 Sponsored by Classical Pursuits  David Levine On the cover of the third issue of The New York Review of Books (September 26, 1963), right in the middle of Susan Sontag’s assessment of the first volume of Albert Camus’s Notebooks, sits a fellow with a large nose. The man is not Camus, but he is a writer—a caricature of one, to be exact. Straddling a tiny desk beside a free-standing mirror, he hunches over his typewriter and plinks away at the keys while warily eyeing his own reflection, which is itself a sort of caricature. Named “The Writer,” this was the artist David Levine’s first contribution to the Review, and it would be far from his last.  Over the next forty-five years, the Review published some 3,500 of Levine’s drawings, each etched in his distinctive line and enlivened by his roundabout wit. A graduate of the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Arts at Temple University, he brought his formal training to bear on the most famous (and infamous) writers, politicians, actors, activists, thinkers, despots, and fools of all time. No one had a greater hand in shaping this magazine’s visual identity.  Advertisement In an appreciation of Levine published shortly after his death in December 2009, Garry Wills writes that the artist “often did the unexpected.” How else could one describe Levine’s drawings? With their knobbly noses and attenuated necks, they could be as lively and strange as boardwalk caricatures—but Levine, Wills notes, “had a kind of surreal imagination that took the next step, the way Mark Twain used to.” (Incidentally, this is an apt description of Levine’s drawing of a self-flagellating Twain, which accompanied Edmund Wilson’s 1968 essay about Twain’s unpublished writing and “the menacing theology of Calvinism.”) In the archive, unexpected riches await. I did not expect, for instance, to find a portrait of Eminem, let alone one as tender as Levine’s, which accompanies Andrew O’Hagan’s essay about the rapper, “Imitation of Life,” from November 6, 2003. Nor did I anticipate encountering Levine’s many, many experiments with blending the human and the animal: Annie Proulx as emu, Günter Grass as toad, James “Demon Dog” Ellroy as aloha-shirted bull terrier tapping away at a laptop.   Perhaps another artist might have thought, as Levine did, to show Lyndon B. Johnson crying literal crocodile tears, with the reptiles tumbling down from his handkerchief, but only Levine would think to draw a crocodile crying Lyndon B. Johnson tears, each drop bulbous with the president’s homely visage.   Even when Levine did choose the more expected route, zeroing in on a person’s most distinctive physical quality and exaggerating it for comedy, he always managed to make his subjects entertaining. If someone wore glasses, you could expect the lenses to be enormous—see Stephen King, goggled up, with a column of owls jockeying to roost on the back of his chair, or Janet Malcolm, sporting an exceptionally stiff bob and a pair of thin black frames that hang over the corners of her toothy grin, or Joan Didion, sporting a droopier bob and thicker black frames, unsmiling, her cigarette off to the side just so.     Advertisement And Levine was always game for the challenge of drawing someone a second, third, or, in the case of Richard Nixon, sixtieth time—a body of work to rival Philip Guston’s Poor Richard series. Wills’s encomium provides a partial accounting of Levine’s depictions of his “great subject”:
      In 1992, when Levine received the Gold Medal in Graphic Art from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Saul Steinberg wrote of his talents “in the more difficult part of his metier, the rendering of the young and beautiful. He does that very well by pointing discreetly, in a handsome face and with unexpected kindness, to the first symptoms of the future crocodile.” Crocodiles past, present, and future, yes, but also peacocks, toads, rabbits, eagles, fish, pigs, elephants, and Tom Cruise.  Levine’s big-nosed writer appeared on the cover of the magazine’s fourth issue, too, this time trapped inside Norman Mailer’s infamous pan of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. But no longer did he have to toil with only his mirror image for company. High above The Writer’s head, a pink coverline heralded the arrival of “A New Series: Literary Caricatures by David Levine,” which began with such choice offerings as Jean Genet standing pigeon-toed in striped convict garb and Paul Goodman tooting a pipe while leading a crowd. Two weeks later, one Arnold Wolfson of Philadelphia wrote in to sing Levine’s praises: “I think the caricatures by David Levine in your last issue are the best since Beerbohm…. Genet and Goodman were superb! But where’s Mary McCarthy?” “Here she is,” the editors answered, and dropped in a new illustration of a grinning McCarthy leaning over a balloon with a needle held behind her back. How apt for Levine: an artist adept at puncturing pretense, on the verge of blowing up. —Brian Ransom  Mary McCarthy  Advertisement More illustrations by David Levine in The New York Review Toni Morrison  Charles Darwin  James Joyce  Herman Melville  Virginia Woolf  Marcel Proust  William Shakespeare  Groucho Marx  James Baldwin  Stanley Kubrick  Billie Holiday  Julia Child  Save $168 on an inspired pairing! |
martes, 26 de agosto de 2025
Tender Eminem, and Other Levines
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