Painting: Coney Island Daumier

One of the delightful discoveries of recent years in the world of caricature has been the deadly penmanship of David Levine, 42, whose witty, polemical line drawings have appeared in Esquire, New York magazine, the New York Review of Books, TIME and Newsweek. The irony is that Levine’s fame rests on a hobby, “something I’ve always done for friends,”* rather than on his paintings and watercolors, which he has done professionally since 1951. Last week, to right the balance, Levine exhibited 48 of his watercolors along with 40 drawings in Manhattan’s Forum Gallery, and thus reminded his admirers of his dual gifts.

Sleepy Magic. In both drawings and watercolors, Levine is that rare man among artists: one who does not deny his forebears. His caricatures, whether of Bertrand Russell looking like a stately pelican or D. H. Lawrence with two female legs kicking orgiastically from beneath his shaggy forelock, acknowledge their indebtedness to Sir John Tenniel and Sir Max Beerbohm. Much of Levine’s bite and humor are caused by the juxtaposition of dated technique and contemporary subject. When it comes to watercolors, his style is equally traditional, and he finds it most unfair that critics who admire his caricatures turn against his watercolors for the same reason. Says he: “It is quite all right to refer to Degas as being ‘derived’ from Ingres, but if you mention a contemporary painter as being ‘derived’ from Degas, it is an insult.”

As far as Levine is concerned, he is contemporary in both media. “My work represents me,” he says firmly. “And I am the present. I am a sensitized creature viewing the world, and this is my statement on it.” If his caricatures testify to a caustic intelligence, his watercolors reveal the telltale heart. A Brooklyn boy, Levine often visited his father’s dress factory, and his deft, murkily lit watercolors of those scenes show that he remembers them fondly and well. He also spent many happy hours at Coney Island, and his sparkling yet dreamily poetic sketches recapture the sleepy magic of glinting waves, roller coasters and bulging bathers.

The Larger Audience. In the patient backs of the garment workers there are echoes of Daumier and Degas, while the light of Levine’s Coney Island is haunted by the shades of Manet and Prendergast. Yet in choosing a 19th century idiom to depict the fast-disappearing world of hand-labor shops and nostalgic memories of big-city beaches, Levine is, after all, doing only what any artist must—suiting style to subject.

If the habitual gallerygoer opts for the caricatures, one explanation is that serious artists in this century have ever more moved toward abstraction and developed an audience that now finds realism intrinsically banal. But, as Levine knows, there is another, even larger audience consisting of “people who don’t live solely in the art world, people who are related to the kind of people I paint.” He is delighted when one of those exclaims, “That picture of a presser looks exactly like my uncle,” or “That woman on the beach reminds me of my aunt.”

*Levine’s career in caricature began by accident in 1960, after one of Esquire’s editors, Clay Felker, spotted a drawing Levine had done for a Christmas card, commissioned him to do drawings for the magazine.