David Levine (cartoonist)

David Levine (born 1926 in Brooklyn , New York City , † December 29, 2009 in New York City) was an American graphic artist and cartoonist .

biography

Levine's father was a textile merchant, his mother a nurse. Both were politically left-wing , which strongly influenced his later political ideals. After attending school, he studied education and painting at the Philadelphia Art School and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn .

After two years of military service, he first turned to painting in the early 1950s. He painted pictures of the workers in Brooklyn, but also of the bathers on Coney Island , which were positively received by the New York critics. According to a critic of the New York Herald Tribune , his painting style was suitable for reviving the imagery of the 19th century without appearing anachronistic or imitative; rather, it asserts its personal identity and intensity. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums in several states, including Ohio , Nebraska, and Washington, DC , and have won several awards. He also designed postcards for large department stores and illustrated brochures.

A humorous drawing by him caught the attention of Esquire editor Clay Felker in the late 1950s . He commissioned him to illustrate the book and film section of his magazine. This was the beginning of his activity as a cartoonist . A little later I worked for the magazine Atlas .

When he founded The New York Review of Books in 1963, he also worked for it, without giving up his work at Esquire and Atlas. He shaped the appearance of the magazine through his typical caricatures with oversized heads, which were his trademark. In addition to his work there, he was also active as a cartoonist for TIME Magazine , the New York Times , the Washington Post and several other publications and published over 3800 drawings during his almost fifty years of activity.

A number of his caricatures received worldwide attention, including the nose of General de Gaulle , Stalin , who leans on a hammer and sickle, Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon as David and Goliath , Richard Nixon , whom he caricatured 66 times, Lyndon Johnson as king Lear, or on other occasions with a belly shaped like the outline of Vietnam . But artists and intellectuals were also caricatured by him, for example John Updike , Jean-Paul Sartre , Albert Einstein , Émile Zola , Robert Musil and Truman Capote . In 1971 David Levine was elected a member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design in New York . In 1983 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

In 2007 he had to give up drawing because of an eye problem. On December 30, 2009, he died in the Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan of prostate cancer and the related complications.

Works

• Pens and Needles , Harvard Common Press, 1969
• No Known Survivors. David Levines Political Plank , introduced and selected by John Kenneth Galbraith , Harvard Common Press, 1970 ISBN 978-0-87645-030-7

Individual evidence

1. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "L" / Levine, David NA 1971 ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on July 1, 2015)  
2. ^ Members: David Levine. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 9, 2019 . 

literature

• Yves-Marie Labbé: Davine Levine . Le Monde , January 2, 2010, p. 17

Web links

• NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG: "Cartoonist David Levine has died." New York Review of Books "shaped for almost half a century"