David Levine

David Levine: Coney Island Watercolors

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in December of 1926, David Levine was an American artist and illustrator. He studied painting at the Pratt Institute in New York and, later in 1946, attended Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, graduating with a degree in education. Levine also studied under painter and teacher Hans Hoffman, whose teaching had a significant influence on post-war American avant-garde artists, including Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Rivers.

Along with doing illustrative work for publications, David Levine produced a body of paintings, many of which were destroyed in a later 1968 fire. Most of Levine’s paintings are watercolors, including portraits of ordinary citizens, seaside images of distinctive architecture, and scenes of vacationers enjoying the day at the beach. He often painted scenes of garment workers, remembering the workers in his father’s garment factory, and scenes of the bathers and amusement rides at Coney Island, a section of his Brooklyn hometown.

Together with portrait artist Aaron Shikler, David Levine founded a salon for artists interested in collective sketching and painting, the Painting Group, in 1958. In the early 1960s, he developed his skills as a political illustrator. He illustrated his first work for The New York Review of Books in 1963, subsequently drawing more than thirty-eight hundred caricatures of famous artists, writers and politicians for the Review’s publication. Levine produced other work of combined equal quantity for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, Time, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy, among others.

David Levine was elected in 1967 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1971. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, and several collections have been published, including Knoph’s 1978 “The Arts of David Levine” and the book “American Presidents”, published in 2008 by Knoph, which features his drawings of U.S. Presidents, covering a span of five decades.

In 2006, David Levine was diagnosed with macular degeneration, and with the gradual loss of his vision, produced no new work after April of 2007. A man who drew people of all political persuasions with the same acid treatment, David Levine died in December of 2009 of cancer at the age of eighty-three.