Medium: Pen and Ink on Paper

Signed: Lower right; To Daniel Friedenberg/David Levine

Date Created: 1964

Dimensions with Frame:

Condition: Excellent

Provenance: Estate of Daniel Friedenberg, gift of the artist

Biography of the Artist:

Pen and Ink caricature of Arthur Koestler.

David Levine, painter, illustrator and caricaturist, was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York, where he continues to live and work. He studied at the School of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; the Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Eighth Street School of New York with modernist-abstractionist Hans Hoffman. Though he is best known for his pen and ink caricatures of world figures in politics, the arts and entertainment (since 1963, he has drawn 2800 pictures for the New York Review of Books alone), Levine also paints figures, portraits and cityscapes of the roller coasters and piers of Coney Island in New York

Levine has received many awards: a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation fellowship in 1955; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Childe Hassam Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; National Academy of Design prizes, including the Isaac Maynard, Julius Hallgarten and Thomas B. Clarke awards; the George Polk Memorial Award; John Pike Memorial Prize; and the Gold Medal of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1993. Levine has also been awarded the French Legion of Honor and, in Landau, Germany, the Thomas Nast Award. He is a long-time Academician of the National Academy of Design, New York City.

David Levine has exhibited in Stuttgart and Munich, Germany; Paris, France; Oxford, England, Beverly Hills, California; Washington, D.C.; and Columbus, Georgia, as well as the Davis Gallery and Forum Gallery in New York City.

Levine is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Brooklyn Museum; Newark Museum, New Jersey; three Washington, D.C. venues including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Library of Congress and National Portrait Gallery; San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, California; and National Portrait Gallery of England.

Pens and Needles, Gambit, Boston, 1969, and The Arts of David Levine, Knopf, New York, 1978, are among six books published on David Levine's art.