David Levine Poem by gershon hepner

From Saul Steinberg comes the gag cartoon,
and from Feiffer comes the comic strip,
from Herblock comes the politician goon,
and from Levine the face that like a quip
can make us laugh. From Nixon, Wittgenstein,
Blunt, Pushkin, Brendel, Updike, Kissinger,
he drew more than can photographs the line
their faces spoke. He was the messenger
who brought the readers of the NYR
the character of people it reviewed,
as if of all of them the avatar,
hilariously perceptive, never rude,
preserving dignity that dwelt behind
the faces even when they were absurd,
their character by David’s skill defined
at least as well as by the published word.

Inspired by Michael Kimmelman’s article of David Levine in the NYT, December 31,2009 (“A Artist Who Started With Lines, but Ended With the Truth”) :
Art Spiegelman used the word “sobriety” when we talked on Wednesday, and that’s right. Mr. Levine brought sobriety back to caricature, among much else. It’s useful to recall that when he came onto the scene the dominant mode was a lighter, comic illustration, and Al Hirschfeld was the reigning master: the pure grace of his line served caricatures that condensed characters to unambiguous nuggets. Mr. Levine started out doing his own witty marginalia for Esquire magazine. But it wasn’t long after he settled in at The New York Review of Books in 1963 that he found his voice, which aimed for the reverse. “Like Daumier” is how Mr. Spiegelman, the author and comics artist, put it, meaning that Mr. Levine harked back to the loftiest ambitions of great 19th-century illustration. He wanted to be biting but at the same time searching, not just for a swift likeness but for the whole depth of a given subject’s character. Unlike Honoré Daumier, who found depth through a liquid, soft-edged line and pools of shadow, Mr. Levine revived from the dead the dense, more precise cross-hatching that brings to mind Thomas Nast and John Tenniel, who worked for the old Punch magazine. This guaranteed a far less glamorous visual style than Hirschfeld’s. Mr. Levine’s works now look almost brave in their gravity and anachronism, but this was also what made him look fresh in the ’60s and accounted for all the imitators who burgled his bobble-headed, slender-bodied figures….
He seemed to want people to think that the book reviews he illustrated were, intellectually speaking, over his head. But his brilliance lay in weaving their ideas with his own. Hence the remarkable drawing he did in 1969 of Ludwig Wittgenstein, slyly kicking away a book. It’s a masterpiece of psychology. The balletic gesture, typical of Mr. Levine — who conveyed in the slight slope of a shoulder or the gentle swing of a hip or some other little bodily detail a large fact about his subject’s character — in this case suggests the arrogant philosopher blithely distancing himself from philosophy. His drawing of Pushkin in 1971 captures the impulsive, proud, independent quality of a gay man whose “many affairs with women were a means of filling the emptiness of boredom, ” as the author of the piece it illustrated wrote. And I’ve got a fondness, a little proprietary maybe, for the illustration he did of the pianist Alfred Brendel, for an article I wrote for The Review in 2003. He caught the slightly comic air of a man resigned to a fame he seemed to bear with a mix of bemusement and resignation. Johnson, Wittgenstein, Pushkin, Brendel: the range of subjects mirrored the range of The Review, a felicity of employment for Mr. Levine. “Who else covered that range? ” Robert Silvers, The Review’s editor, asked rhetorically. Eulogists are stressing the political satire but he was just as deft, and will be just as prized, I suspect, for drawing Fred Astaire in motion; or the dead Igor Stravinsky in Venice as a nose floating in a gondola; or Count Basie at the keyboard with a lighted cigarette still between his fingers; or Anthony Blunt, the Cambridge-trained art historian and Soviet spy, whom Mr. Levine renders in tweeds with one limp fist raised in a Red salute.

12/31/09