Irony can be as cruel as intentions, as David Levine has discovered.
At 81, his stature as the most highly regarded caricaturist in the world is secure, thanks to multiple, decades-spanning appearances in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Time, Vanity Fair (which includes a portfolio of some of his illustrations in its November issue) and, most famously, The New York Review of Books, with whom he has been associated virtually from its start in 1963.
But last year, Levine and the Review parted ways. Or so it seems. The journal, one of the most influential publications in among the world's movers and shakers, continues to reproduce archival images from the 3,000 or more portraits it has commissioned from Levine over the years. The artist, according to Vanity Fair's David Margolick, remains on contract with the NYRB until the end of this year and is still identified as the review's "staff artist" on its masthead. But there have been no new Levine portraits on its pages for months.
The reason? Levine was diagnosed last year with macular degeneration, a progressively worsening medical condition resulting in the steady obliteration of the centre of one's vision. While he has some peripheral vision, which allows him to perform most daily functions, it's insufficient for the detailed pen-and-ink work that has been at once the artist's signature and that of the periodical he has served so ably. "I can't get the good hand in there any more," he says.
Before his diagnosis, Levine had already switched to pencil renderings because "pencil is more forgiving." However, this never entirely satisfied him or the editors at the NYRB. Levine was also unhappy with the digital photographs he was getting as research material for his caricatures. "They give you a flatter quality of detail. They're not as form-full as they used to be, and I need the roundness."
Worse, perhaps, was Levine's belief that "at almost 82, I felt I was losing the let's-go-out-and-get-'em kind of feel about things" that previously sparked his best work. Like his 1974 portrait of U.S. president Richard Nixon as the Godfather. ("Every day, there was something Nixon did that helped us poor satirists.") Or the one, from 1970, of Haitian dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier wearing a bow tie shaped like a submachine gun. Or the 2003 caricature of Robert McNamara, U.S. defence secretary during the Vietnam War, crying crocodile tears. Literally. So did he jump from The New York Review? Or was he pushed?
Levine wasn't really saying during a recent visit to Toronto, in which he spoke at the Ontario College of Art & Design, then attended the opening of a small commercial exhibition of his caricatures, mostly 28-by-36-centimetre portraits of Canadians such as Margaret Atwood, Glenn Gould and Jane Jacobs ($6,000 each.) "I was tilted …" was about all he would allow during an interview.
A self-described "Brooklyn nationalist" who still calls the borough home, Levine seems philosophical about the loss of his vision. Adding to the irony, he noted, is the fact his 52-year-old son, Matthew, is both an artist himself and the director of communications and marketing for the Research to Prevent Blindness Foundation. "That doesn't mean there's a solution for my eyes," Levine observed as he ran a hand through a still impressive thatch of hair. "But Matthew keeps me aware of what's happening in the field." (Matthew Levine also runs David Levine Ink, Inc., which sells limited edition fine-art prints of his father's work.)
"Really," he said with a shrug, "you don't have a choice. … The worst part is that there's more fear and caring about what may threaten your eye. If you break your arm, well, that's too bad. It'll heal; maybe they'll put a nail in somewhere and keep it together. But the eye - so much information comes through that way and when you think of not having that, of having blurry vision when you need sharp angles, well, that changes many things." ("But," he noted at his OCAD presentation, "I'm still a good dancer.")
It's unlikely that another change might be a turn toward religion. Levine is an atheist and has been since he was a child in Brooklyn. His father, Harry, was a garment manufacturer, and his mother, Lena, was a nurse, and theirs was a "highly charged leftist" household. Discussion about Stalin, Trotsky and McCarthyism were as much a staple at dinner as potato pudding and brisket.
Being an atheist, though, is dull, according to Levine, who, as a joke, will sometimes sign his autograph "D. Levine (dot) Commie." "You say you're an atheist and that's the end of it. There's nothing to practise. I mean, Nixon wanted to dress up the White House police in a special uniform, so sometimes I think there should be a kind of line of clothing for atheists, so we can know each other, so we can pray together."
Levine's leftism is more "bias" (his word) than philosophy or ideology. "I like to think I'm just as hard on those in leadership positions whether they're right or left," he said in his soft Brooklyn squawk. "My focus has always been on the condition of human beings, those with power, those without. Those with power always have to be looked at by somebody and frequently my Congress is not doing that looking." Politicians, in particular, "should be jumped on as often as possible," he has said.
Levine claims to have never been a voluminous reader and what he has read, he has read slowly. ("Now, I'm a slow see-er," he says, the "er" pronounced, in classic Brooklynese, as "uh.") As for the pitch-perfect quality of many of his greatest caricatures, most done for the New York Review, that derives less from deep knowledge of the subjects than from his grasp of the articles he was commissioned to illustrate and the spark they gave to his conceptual and visual intelligence.
"I'm eternally thankful to the New York Review for the extraordinary range of subjects that I got," Levine remarked. Not only did the articles serve as a kind of university-in-a-hurry, the sheer volume of illustrative work required - the NYRB is published at least 20 times a year - at once sharpened and broadened his technique. Or, as Levine himself put it: "The drawings were able to reach a certain kind of illustrative portraiture." As a result, connoisseurs of Levine's draftsmanship - the strength and subtlety of his line, the use of curvilinear hatching and cross-hatching to convey form, texture and light - compare it not just to the work of other caricaturists (Honoré Daumier, Max Beerbohm, John Tenniel) but to that of Ingres, Picasso and Durer.
Levine is fully conversant with all these references. While much of his childhood was spent around Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers (where Levine once shook Franklin Delano Roosevelt's hand), he also was a regular visitor to the Brooklyn Museum which heightened a nascent interest in art. After high school, Levine attended Philadelphia's Tyler School of Art, ostensibly to get a teaching certificate in art but also to become "a damn fine comic-book artist," in the manner of his self-described "god," Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit.
While in Philadelphia, however, he became a habitué of the Philadelphia Museum and the nearby Barnes Foundation as well as becoming friends with Aaron Shikler, a painter who later did the official White House portrait of John F. Kennedy. Through these influences, Levine developed a taste for painting - Édouard Vuillard, Corot, Pierre Bonnard, Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent became particular favourites - and he has painted himself since the early 1950s, primarily as a watercolorist depicting beach scenes at Coney Island, roller coasters, garment-trade workers, bleachers and exterior scenes of Venice and Rome.
Although he has had dozens of one-man shows of these paintings, they've never superseded the caricatures in popularity or acclaim. This lack of recognition has occasionally bothered Levine. "Sure, I paint in an old-fashioned 19th-century kind of imitation," he observed, but so what? What are his caricatures if not an elaboration or extension of another 19th-century idiom? One day, he hopes a smart critic will write about the connections between his caricatures, his drawings and the paintings.
"The same hand does these things, the same heart and mind is involved," he declared. "Yes, they play different roles, but that relieves you, in a sense, that playing of roles. There's an 'answer' for how you feel on this day when this or that happens politically or how you just went to an opera and whether you liked it or not. … You have this gift of response."
Levine, of course, is not the first great artist to suffer from severe eye problems. Degas is believed to have had macular degeneration. Monet had cataracts, Mary Cassatt too. Levine still paints, admittedly on larger canvases and with less detail than before, and each Wednesday he meets with The Painting Group, a loose-knit gathering of realist-based artists, amateur and professional, that he and Shikler formed in 1958.
For Levine, his macular degeneration is an opportunity for a new way of seeing, for finding new ways to put meaningful marks on paper and canvas, just as it was for Degas. At the same time, he thinks the "hand-made art" that has been his rai son d'être and our joie de vivre "is pretty much at the end. The art of our time is really in film. Film makes a move on everything - colour, black-and-white, numbers of people involved, landscaping, movement, immediacy - there's so much more intensity there that people with a little brush in their hand cannot really do … We're way overmatched."
Levine had a chance to get into "the pick-chahs." A magazine once organized a contest, sponsored by Walt Disney, inviting interested readers to mail in a drawing of Goofy. Winners would be invited to travel to Disney's Los Angeles studios to audition for jobs. "I wanted very much to be an animator," Levine recalled, so he sent in his drawing. Disney liked what it saw and urged the aspiring animator, "C'mon out to California."
"I can't," Levine replied. "I'm 9."
David Levine's Canadians is on view at Gallery 345, 345 Sorauren Ave., Toronto, through Sunday. His latest book, American Presidents , will be published this month by Fantagraphics Books.