Pete Hamill on David Levine Catalouge Essay, Forum Gallery The sun is in his paintings, and salt air, and the splendid variety of the human body. Here is David Levine: marvelous artist, acute witness, passionate city dweller. He positions himself most often at the edge of the land and the beginning of the sea. Others have possessed this beach. Reginald Marsh. George Bellows. Weegee. But for a long time now it has belonged to David Levine. To be sure, this is not some rare beach on the far side of the earth. This is Coney Island, more peninsula than island, and the beach serves the people of the vast city of New York. With his paint box, pencil, brushes and water, Levine is there among them, gazing at them, year after year, with an unsentimental but affectionate eye. Their ruined monuments are his too. Their freak shows and bazaars are part of his consoling vision. He delights in their bodies, shaped by toil, children, urban tension, the erosions of time. He marks their existence, and they great value, as they come to the healing sun and the forgiving sea. Those cheap clothes hanging outside the shops are more than abstract patterns of color, or a pleasing motif; they are evidence, a form of testimony. These are the clothes of the city poor, clothes bought by mothers with dwindling amounts of cash, shirts and shorts from job lots that will get their children across another summer. They exist in the present, but the New Yorker comes to them with the baggage of memory. For the shopkeepers are almost all immigrants, many from places where other seas growl upon the beaches, and the stalls evoke memories of other immigrants, speaking other languages, who found their pieces of America on Orchard Street. And the clothes at the second hand shop: who wore them when the price tags were new? That blouse must have adorned some young woman setting out with a boy for an evening at the movies, the night full of possibility and the unknowable future. That shirt might have been worn to a job interview that failed. That skirt to a courtroom where strangers tried to unravel and judge another sad instance of human folly. And that older woman, bent over a sewing machine in the “Operator” of 1994: did she make some of these garments seen and painted only three years later? And who is she? Her children are probably grown and gone away. Does she live alone? Did she become, when all else was gone, merely what she did to put food on a table, decade after decade? What faces move through her dreams? When she works, does she hum an old and vagrant tune? The paintings of David Levine are never bombastic; they are small by the standards of contemporary painted oratory. But their size alone demands scrutiny of a different order, and a surrender to suggestion. They are seldom only about the thing or the place or the people directly observed. They are also about the unseen world that they suggest, a world of time and nostalgias, of things and people lost. If David Levine was a writer he would be Chekov. In the painting called “Past and Present”, the dead roller coaster in the background stands like a monument to summers forever gone. The sailors on liberty are gone, and so are the squealing girls and the odor of buttered corn and the places where my father did his drinking while my mother tended the children on the packed hot August sands. The roller coaster made its first perilous drop with the sound of a million nickels falling on steel. The hurdy gurdy played without end. The Dodgers were batting on ten thousand portable radios. Lost children wept forlornly. The old refused to look at the sea because beyond the sea were the dark and brutal cities of Europe. A few feet away, an exhausted man, not yet old but no longer young, slept on a blanket, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. The hard oiled bodies of the young moved steadily among the sagging gray bodies of the aged. Here at Coney Island on a Sunday afternoon, when that roller coaster was alive and bright with color and filled with thrilled voices. And yet, in this elegant painting, we also see the people of the triumphant present and they are fittingly in the foreground. The palette is as muted as a late afternoon. But the people who live now are there on the stairs, in bathing suits, lugging umbrellas and towels, the day’s small pleasures almost over. On the boardwalk, a mysterious woman in a long white dress shields her eyes and stares without fear at Europe. Beyond the blackened girders of the roller coaster is the subway and the subway will bring them all home. The emotion in these paintings is almost always an embrace. Whatever instinct David Levine has for savagery or contempt is limited to his caricatures, which are, quite simply, the greatest of this century; even in those extraordinary drawings, contempt is reserved for those who use power against the people of his paintings. In his paintings he is more like Corot or Matisse, celebrating the concrete pleasures of the visible world and suggesting that flesh, light, work, and food are infinitely more valuable than any abstraction, any transitory fame or power. It is a measure of his celebratory instinct that there are no freaks in his paintings of freak shows. He gives us instead the small barkers in their ticket booths and the immense signs that offer the oddities within. Those signs are weathered by salt and wind, that is to say, by the passage of time. They remind us that men have always offered strangeness to the fancy of paying customers, but it is in the end a show, not the world itself. In his portraits, Levine gives us human beings one at a time. Here he draws with paint, with subtle washes, built up and layered, like the shifting movements of a life. They are not colored drawings; they are paintings. And with paint, David Levine shows us how specific the human face can be, how mouth and eyes, even in repose, tell us about the living of a life, and how clothes can express unstated longings. In each face, in the posture of each model, he urges us to pause and look. To look as hard as he did. These are the people we pass in the street and never see. And yet each could be a novel. Each would have a tale to tell, perhaps about betrayal or the disappointments of the carnal or the small triumphs that hang about a life like old clothes. As always, the specific can give us the universal. Even when he takes his paint box to other places, David Levine seems to approach what he sees with an eye forever shaped by the glories of his own city and the beach he now owns. In the painting of the Roman Forum, expressed in the muted light of a stormy day, the New York artist embraces the specifics of place; the architecture is captured with exactness; the pitted texture of warm stone suggests the long-gone presence of the people who built it. But in the silence of that ancient place I can hear a voice. It is David Levine whispering to Corot. Come with me, he is saying. I will show you other monuments to the ruined past. Come and see the Thunderbolt. Come and see Surf Avenue on an August afternoon. Come to view the parachute ride. Come to the sea and the infinite sky and the men crabbing off the pier. Come, Corot: we will paint together.