14 Facts About David Levine

David Levine was an American artist and illustrator best known for his caricatures in The New York Review of Books.

David Levine's mother, Lena, was a nurse and political activist who had communist sympathies.

David Levine began to draw as a child, displaying a precocious talent that, at the age of nine, won him an invitation to audition for an animator's position in Disney's Los Angeles Studios.

David Levine later studied painting at Pratt Institute, at Temple University's Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1946, and with Hans Hofmann.

Immediately following World War II, David Levine served in the US Army.

David Levine initially hoped to be a full-time painter, but was often forced to subsist on illustration work from publications like Gasoline Retailer.

David Levine's paintings are mostly watercolors that often depict garment workers, honoring his father's employees, and bathers at Coney Island.

Only about half of David Levine's caricatures were created for the Review.

Levine's work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums around the world, and several collections of his paintings and drawings have been published by the Review and elsewhere, such as The Arts of David Levine, published by Knopf in 1978.

David Levine's work, taken as a whole, had a leftwing bent, and he claimed still to be a communist, although people of all political persuasions came in for the same acid treatment in David Levine's caricatures.

In 2006, David Levine was diagnosed with macular degeneration, an eye disease that leads to blindness.

On December 29,2009, David Levine died at New York Presbyterian Hospital at the age of 83.

David Levine's death was caused by prostate cancer and a number of subsequent illnesses.

David Levine was survived by his second wife, Kathy Hayes, two children, Matthew and Eve, two stepchildren, Nancy and Christopher Rommelmann and grandchildren.