KAREN WILKIN
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Levy rarely showed his work in those early days and later on, it was
almost impossible to see. (A head that Dehner owned was the first I saw in
actuali ty-in the early 1970s.) Then, in recent years, tantalizingly small
groups of pictures began to appear at Babcock Gallery, enough to promise
the existence of a substantial body of strong work, but not enough to clar–
ify Levy's contribution to the heady early days of the New York School.
Finally, this spring, simultaneous shows at ME Modern and Babcock pro–
vided a comprehensive overview of this little-known artist's achievement.
It
was all enormously interesting, particularly for what the pictures revealed
about the relationships between Levy and his fellow modernists when they
were young, although the effect of seeing more Levy, I am sorry to say,
was to diminish, rather than enhance, the impact of those first exhibitions
of promising pictures. Less Levy, it seems, turns out to be more.
The works of the 1930s and early '40s proved to be the most vigorous
and full of conviction-Picassoid, to be sure, but made personal by lush,
dry paint-handling, inventive color, and robust modeling. Marsden Hartley,
as much as Picasso, sometimes seems to be one of Levy's chosen ancestors.
Like his Brooklyn Heights neighbors of the 1930s, Smith and Gottlieb,
Levy was attracted to Surrealist notions of tapping the unconscious as a
source of imagery, and like them, he produced his share of mysterious dra–
mas enacted by bony, organic forms distilled equally from Picasso's skeletal
bathers, his pneumatic sleeping women, and his "rod and ball" drawings.
Some of Levy's complex interiors are intriguingly close to Smith's "house"
sculptures of about the same time, with their conflated figures and fur–
nishings, and their collapsed space. But Smith and Gottlieb used these ideas
as points of departure and transformed them into highly charged, wholly
original, spatially and emotionally ambiguous abstractions. Levy held on to
recognizable imagery so tightly that his most adventurous works can read
less as reinventions of form in non-specific language than as cartoon-like
depictions of the actual in clever "modernistic" terms.
In
his later years,
Levy abandoned this gnarled surrealism for simplified figures and still lifes
reminiscent of Avery's work of the 1940s and early '50s, absent Avery's
trust in the eloquence of contour and the emotive power of large expanses
of uninflected, saturated color.
Which is not to say that there were not some wonderful pictures in the
Levy survey:
Still Life with Clay Pipe
(1935), for example, a muscular paint–
ing that seems to anticipate late Philip Guston in its clash of broadly
defined forms, quirky massing, and seductive paint handling, or
Flight Over
Manhattan
(1942), with its knot of geometric buildings and radiating piers,
an ocean liner and the Brooklyn Bridge, all crammed into a nearly square
canvas behind a fat pink airplane that seems to burst from the confines of
the canvas. Levy's insistent touch and a brashly dotted border help to force
