The Legacy of David Levine

The world has lost one of the greatest political caricaturists ever.

David Levine, who died recently at the age of 83, was probably one of the best political caricaturists of his time.

His brilliant political cartoons, which he started drawing in 1963 for Esquire magazine and the New York Review of Books, were incisive, biting, and savagely powerful takes on public figures. With his signature exaggerated heads and facial features, Levine belonged to the top echelon of famous cartoonists reaching back to the Renaissance origins of political caricature as an art form.

Like many of his artist colleagues, he also produced more traditional paintings, mostly watercolors and traditional portraiture. But he earned his bread and butter income through his contracts to produce illustrations to order – a graphic gun for hire – for a variety of publications. Much of his work is now held in private art collections and museums.

Levine’s was “loaded” caricature, revealing the origins of the term from Italian and French words that describe the loading or charging of firearms. This semantic relationship succinctly underlines the sublimated aggression that many subsequent theorists, Freud being the most notable, have suggested is inherent in the caricaturing and cartooning process.

Thomas Wright, for example, the author of one of the earliest English language studies of visual and literary humour, called caricature "a bastard kind of pleasure." The German painter Max Liebermann purportedly said of one of his contemporaries: "A face like his I can piss into snow."

Levine’s graphic satires bear comparison with Liebermann, but also with Goya’s “Disaster of War” series, Honoré Daumier’s political caricatures, the graphic work of Thomas Nast, and 20th century satirists such as George Grosz.

Context and familiarity are critical for reader comprehension of a satirical caricature and Levine was among the best at capturing the essence of well-known individuals such as Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Ariel Sharon, and Yassar Arafat among many others. Levine revealed the idiocy of their beliefs or actions through an exaggeration of their features.

One of my favourites ) is Levine’s irreverent caricature of a triumphant Henry Kissinger, his naked body covered by a U.S. flag “bed cover,” copulating energetically with a woman who has the world globe for a head.

Another drawing presents Richard Nixon lasciviously stuffing his incisor filled mouth and that of a thanksgiving pig with grapes.

Both images were meant to go with essays, but their strength as political satire speaks for itself.

A quote that appears in many books and essays on his work underlines Levine’s belief that caricature should not be too destructive. “Caricature that goes too far simply lowers the viewer’s response to a person as a human being,” he said.

The importance of an artist like David Levine can be measured by his legacy, and there is ample evidence of this in the testimonies that have been written by younger cartoonists around the world.