Press Articles and Magazines

Art: The Younger Generation

Published on Monday, Mar. 11, 1957

"John Levee, 32, a talented new expatriate Paris painter who (along with Sam Francis, 33, and Paul Jenkins, 33) has made a name for himself abroad, was picked for both the Whitney and Museum of Modern Art shows. A U.S. Air Force officer during World War II, Levee went to Paris to study painting on the G.I. bill. First registered at the Academic Julian, he was nearly thrown out for flouting academic standards, wound up sharing the school's Grand Prix second prize with his Parisian wife. Approaching abstraction via Cezanne and the Cubists, Levee also shows the influence of his French contemporaries Pierre Soulages and the late Nicolas de Stael. but now feels his painting is becoming less French, more American, "less architectural, less constructed, more organic." 

Art: Small Gouaches

Published on Nov. 6, 1957

"Another exhibition featuring gouaches is John Levee's at the Andre Emmerich Gallery, 18 East Seventy-seventh Street. Levee, a young American who lives in Paris, offers improvisations. They are, for the most part, expressions of movement in space. Levee uses line to suggest motility and color to produce the volumes affected by this move- ment. In a few of the more simple paintings Levee achieves a dynamic relation- ship between the space of the white page and the thrust of lines on it."

Through the Galleries

Published on July 22, 1960 (translated from French)

"JOHN LEVEE (born in 1924 in Los Angeles) is one of those young American painters who settled in Paris after the war. Along with Chelimsky, Downing, and others, he participated in the traveling exhibition of American painters and sculptors in France, which toured major provincial cities that summer. He also exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the Salon de Mai.

This time, however, is a major solo exhibition. His penchant for soft, ashen impasto, chaotically applied in square strokes, is evident, particularly in a series of large, square canvases through which the thick color flows transversely, as if following a perilous path across space. This structure, which leaves large blank areas in the surface, is currently enjoying a certain vogue among several of Levée's compatriots. Here, it is treated opaquely, in a deliberate choice of bold color assertion, where blues and blacks recur insistently. There is no subject, and the canvases are simply titled with the name of a month followed by a number. In other canvases, the broad black streaks that the painter favors emerge from an arrangement of shaggy violence."

MIND AND EYE; The Outer and Inner Worlds of Artists Reflected Faithfully in Their Work

Published on Nov. 6, 1960

"Levee's substantially encrusted and complex picture surfaces are dramatically, even emotionally conceived. Paint is handled in a virtuoso fashion, hardening into rich nuggets, flaring out in a texture like that of crushed jewels, or just touching the canvas in flecks or in long thin trails. The existence of these pictures is positive and occa-sionally aggressive. Levee pulls out all the stops in his color-paint-touch organ and the combined results are decidedly impressive."

John Levee Shows Art at the Leavin

Published on Aug. 17, 1970

"John Levee shows collages and lithographs at the Margo Leavin Gallery (9028 Norma Place). Compositions consist of hard-edge formats often packed with circles and segments. Levee's first mature art was in abstract expressionist style. The emotive push-pull tensions of that past probably are what prevents these geometric compositions from going flat.

Collages are built from pieces of cut cork and cardboard, painted in near with sherbet variations. They often feel like sculpture in very low relief. Such artists will probably one day provide history with a solid bridge between painterly abstraction and color art. Levee reminds one, simultaneously, Albers, Vasarely and Al Held. He produces an art of admirably quiet strength that may just whisper too softly for its own good."