Levine, David (1926 – 2009)

David Levine original caricature art

David Levine was best known for his caricatures in The New York Review of Books. Jules Feiffer has called him "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th Century". A job at Esquire in the early 1960s saw Levine develop his skills as a political illustrator.  His first work for The New York Review of Books appeared in 1963, just a few months after the paper was founded. Levine would review a draft of the article to be illustrated, together with photos or other images sent by the staff of the Review. Within a few days, he would return a finished drawing that caught "a large fact about his subject's character"; "his brilliance lay in weaving [the article's] ideas with his own". Only about half of Levine's caricatures were created for the Review. Other work has appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, Sports Illustrated, New York Magazine, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Nation, Playboy, and others. As a caricaturist for these publications, Levine distinguished his process from that of political cartoonists: "I could take time to really look it over and think about it, read the articles and so on. The political cartoonists don't get a chance. The headlines are saying this and this about so-and-so, and you have to come up with something which is approved by an editor. I almost never had to get an approval. In forty years I may have run into a disagreement with The New York Review maybe two times." The New York Times described Levine's illustrations as "macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates" that were "heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles .... to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg". The paper commented: "His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one."