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12/2/2004

David Levine

Forum Gallery, New York

Escape


"Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a comic art ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease. Levine is one of America's assets. In a confusing time, he bears witness. In a shoddy time, he does good work. Here he is." — John Updike

Forum Gallery is pleased to present Escape, an exhibition of the recent works of the essential New York artist, David Levine. The show will feature watercolors as well as caricature drawings. For four decades, Levine’s subject matter has directly been related to the world he observes – where he lives, wherever he travels and the people he meets.

Perhaps best known for his observation of the beaches, boardwalks, amusement parks and people of Coney Island (Brooklyn, New York), Levine’s ability to capture the image of humanity at leisure has made his watercolors synonymous with Coney Island. He has painted a lifetime of the work-worn bodies and the plain faces of the people of New York. Coney Island and all of Brooklyn is, to Levine, what Florence was to the Renaissance masters. He loves the Brooklyn Bridge, and still finds inspiration in the Statue of Liberty.

Much as he is a painter of “Everyday Man,” Levine is also recognized as one of the greatest caricaturists of the 20th Century. Forum Gallery will exhibit forty original caricature drawings, many of which have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Time.

David Levine began by freelancing for Esquire in 1958 and since the early 1960’s has become a mainstay at the New York Review of Books, where he has caricatured great literary, artistic, and political figures. In his drawings, the subjects of urgent reports by newscasters and of solemn journalistic examination fly through the air, lay golden eggs and turn into witches.

David Levine estimates that he has done as many as 5,000 drawings, "The hand never stops. When I'm asleep, I have to hold it."

David Levine was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1926 and studied at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School, Pratt Institute, the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and the Eighth Street School of New York with Hans Hoffman. His influences run from Will Eisner and Harold Foster to Edouard Vuillard and Thomas Eakins.

David Levine’s many awards began with the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 1955; the George Polk Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Childe Hassam Purchase Prize (American Academy of Arts and Letters), and the Gold Medal of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1993.

David Levine is represented in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Newark Museum, the Library of Congress and the National Portrait Gallery, the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, the National Portrait Gallery of England and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

David Levine: Escape opens with a reception on February 12 from 5:30 – 7:30 pm, and will be on view through March 20, 2004. A full color catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

New York
Forum Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
tel 2123554545

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