Levine, currently being honored with exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and at Madison Avenue's Forum Gallery, almost never meets his victims. Instead, he draws from photographs. "We are all vain to some extent," he explains. "Nobody likes to see his features distorted. This way, I feel perfectly free to make any kind of statement. I would be too embarrassed to draw somebody while he was sitting there."
The Brooklyn-born son of a dress manufacturer, Levine began as a social satirist by sketching lady garment workers. He still likes to draw them at their sewing machines down the hall from his cavernous New York studio. His technique is to zero in on a subject's hair first, then the eyes, nose, mouth and ears.
Levine's first published caricature was not a politician but satirist-adman Stan Freberg for a 1953 Esquire story. His first major political target was the Kennedy family, whom he depicted looking foolish as they played touch football on the White House lawn. They have neither forgotten nor forgiven, he says. Because he is a self-described tennis fanatic, Levine has tried for several years to play in the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Pro-Celebrity tennis tournament. "I've even had George Plimpton, a friend of mine and the Kennedys, speak on my behalf," Levine complains, "but Ethel says no."
The role of caricaturist, as Levine sees it, "is to be unsparingly critical of anybody aspiring to political power." His drawings can move beyond the "unsparing" to pure savagery. A famous example was Lyndon Johnson exhibiting his gallbladder scar in the shape of Vietnam. An outspoken socialist, Levine finds all the major presidential contenders objectionable. "Scoop Jackson," the artist notes with some disdain, "hides behind a mask. He is only interested in getting votes, and consequently none of his personality shows through." As for Wallace, "You have only to look at the eyes or the mouth and nothing else." President Ford "has a jagged, double-edged smile and narrow eyes with overhanging eyelids."
Levine spends much of his time honing his talents as a watercolorist. He first started painting Brooklyn and Coney Island beach scenes in the 1950s and today shares a studio with Aaron Shikler, the painter whose official portrait of John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House. "Painting," explains Levine, "is the outlet I have for expressing what is beautiful in life." He also finds enjoyment in his family: wife Minnie, a nutritionist who put Levine on a diet that helped him lose 50 pounds, a 16-year-old daughter, Eve, and son Matthew, 20, a student at Oberlin College.
Still, Levine is a cartoonist first. "I can go down on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street and scream my head off," he says, "or I can sit down and draw a caricature that will get people thinking twice about a politician—or a President."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
