David Levine

David Levine

1926–2009

President Lyndon Johnson was recovering from gallbladder surgery in 1966, when he pulled up his shirt to show reporters his scar. David Levine, later sketching Johnson for The New York Review of Books, transformed the scar into a map of Vietnam. Such trenchant wit led many critics to call Levine the nation’s foremost political caricaturist, the heir to such giants as Thomas Nast and Honoré Daumier. He died last week of prostate cancer.

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The Brooklyn, N.Y.–born Levine “grew up in a proletarian, politicized world,” said Vanity Fair. “His father ran a small clothing factory; his mother was a left-wing rabble-rouser.” When not watching May Day parades and other labor demonstrations in Manhattan’s Union Square and handing out the Daily Worker, Levine drew the animal exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum. After honing his talent at a Philadelphia arts school, “he survived on work from publications like Gasoline Retailer.” In 1960 he produced his first drawings for Esquire; three years later, he began drawing for the fledgling New York Review of Books.

“His political illustrations in the Review were a biweekly fix for the fuming Left,” said The New York Times. Using a dense, crosshatching technique, Levine imbued his famous subjects with “eccentrically shaped heads, exaggeratedly bad haircuts,” and other physical foibles to cut them down to size. He rendered George W. Bush as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Andy Warhol as Alfred E. Neuman, and equipped Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan “with scales of justice, balancing people and dollar bills.” Levine drew his favorite subject, Richard M. Nixon, 66 times, “depicting him as the Godfather, as Captain Queeg, as a fetus.” Perhaps his most controversial drawing was of Henry Kissinger having sex with a woman whose head was shaped like a globe—“depicting, Levine explained later, what Kissinger had done to the world.”

“I might want to be critical,” Levine said, “but I don’t wish to be destructive. Caricature that goes too far simply lowers the viewer’s response to a person as a human being.” Levine kept drawing until 2007, when eye disease effectively ended his career. He is survived by his wife and two children from an earlier marriage.