Robert L. Levers Jr.

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Robert L. Levers Jr. was an American artist and painter. He was born April 11, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, and died February 6, 1992, in Austin, Texas. He received a B.F.A. (1952) and an M.F.A. (1961) from

University of Texas, Austin, where he taught and painted for the rest of his life. His paintings explore conflict, chaos, destruction, and apocalyptic themes with a mordant humor.[1][2][3]

Early life and education

Robert L. Levers Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1930, the son of Robert L. Levers, Sr., an Englishman with artistic interests, and Gertrude (Burrow) Levers. He attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and received a B.F.A. in 1952. In the early 1950s he was a teacher at the Whitney Art School in New Haven, Connecticut, and also worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York City. Levers married Mary Lou Schlichting in 1954 and they had two daughters and a son. He served as a gunnery officer in the United States Navy from 1954 to 1957, mostly in the Caribbean during peacetime. After his service in the Navy, he worked at the "Famous Artists School", a correspondence school based in Westport, Connecticut, where he learned how to teach, and further develop his drawing skills. He returned to Yale University, where he studied under Josef Albers and earned his M.F.A. in 1959 to 1961. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Columbia Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1959 and his work was included in an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1960. Levers taught at Yale for one year before moving to Texas.[1][3][4][5]

Career and exhibitions

In 1961, Levers joined the faculty of the University of Texas, Austin, where he taught painting and drawing until his death in 1992. He received several honors, including a Ford Foundation Faculty Grant, teaching-excellence awards in 1963 and 1984, and he was named the Leslie Waggener Professor of Fine Arts in 1987.

New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal; Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; The National Gallery, Athens, Greece; The King St. Stephens Museum, Szekesfehervar, Budapest, Hungary; State Art and Sculpture Museum, Ankara, Turkey.[1][3][6]

Robert Levers work has been shown throughout the United States; he listed 135 "selected exhibitions" on his

Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock (1989). In 1990 the exhibition "Northwest by Southwest: Painted Fictions" included his work and toured several museums and universities across the USA: Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert, California; Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana; Western Gallery, Western Washington State University, Bellingham; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Texas.[1][5][7]

Robert Levers's paintings have been exhibited in several art museums in Texas including:

Amarillo Art Center; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; El Paso Museum of Art; Tyler Museum of Art; Waco Art Center. In 1991 a retrospective exhibit of his work was organized by Austin's Laguna Gloria Art Museum; it toured Texas in 1991 and 1992.[5]

Collections

Media

Levers worked in traditional art media, predominantly oils, watercolor, and pen-and-ink, but also

gouaches, chalk, charcoal, and mixed media pieces with various combinations. Exceptions include a number of construction pieces from the early 1970s, in which drawings and watercolors of combat figures and explosions were cutout and collaged onto pieces of wood cut to matching shapes. These figures stand on painted wooden bases, some with drawn/collaged backdrops. Levers was also a printmaker, particularly in the last 20 years of his life, working with the Peregrine Press in Dallas and the Flatbed Press in Austin among others, producing aquatints, etching, and lithographs.[4][5][8]

Stylistic development, and subjects

Early Work 1950-1972: Although Levers exhibited during the late 1950s through the early 1970s, his work before 1973 is absent from exhibition catalogues after 1973 and his retrospective exhibit in 1991.

National Museum of Anthropology and other galleries, as well as a trip to the Yucatán Peninsula to view Mayan ruins. However those influence were said to have been "so deeply absorbed as to be invisible in his art".[3] On one visit to Mexico City during the 1968 Olympic Games, he witnessed protesting students clash with riot police, an event that was to influence his work, contributing to a shift toward figurative painting and an exploration of themes in conflict and violence.[1]

Mid Period 1973-1982: Levers produced drawings and watercolors that made up a substantial part of his output in the early to mid 1970s. Many pieces from this period (including oil paintings) appear in compartmental and fragmented compositions, sometimes resembling comic strips. However, these strips do not illustrate a clear linear narrative, as one author noted "Levers' strip-form designs defy attempts to tell their stories: as comic strips they are frustrating."

Magic Realism but neither term can really be applied to his paintings accurately.[3][4]

The late 1970s and early 1980s mark a period of maturation in Levers work, in style, technique, subject matter, and content. "

Goya, who produced tapestry designs and portraits into his 40s then budded into a master late in life, Levers' work showed a significant growth in his late 40s. "The consistent development of his style manifests an intellectual power that the humor, earthiness, and fantasy of his subjects might mask for the casual observer."[4] Starting about 1979 the predominance of drawings begin to swing to increasing numbers of oil paintings. Faces and heads were increasingly represented with natural features, albeit occasionally masked or hooded.[3] After receiving a National Endowment for the Arts Artists Fellowship, he lived full-time in New York City for a time in 1980–81, absorbing the wealth of art in the museums there, particularly the old masters (e.g. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and his Punchinellos).[3]

Late Work 1983-1992: "The Destruction of Memorial Stadium seems to announce a larger theater of ideas".

LBJ Presidential Library (1985) to the Tower of Babel (1991), under siege by terrorist and going up in smoke and flames. Another informal series portrays hooded terrorists in bullfighting rings and other arenas ineptly juggling plates and other peculiar activities.[5][8]

Levers made his first trip to Europe to participate in the Venice Biennale in 1984; he later stated "My purpose was to research Renaissance and Baroque figure painting, make notes and sketches, and return home to begin a series of large paintings involving life-size or nearly life-size figures."

Mutatis Mutandis, Incorporated (1984, 72 x 90 inches, oil on canvas) depicts an ominous gust of wind descending on four suited executives; the self-descriptive God Creating Animals (1989, 60 x 90 inches, oil on canvas); Taking Care of Old People (1990, 17 x 22 inches, mixed media drawing) recalls some of the symbolist graphic work of Odilon Redon and Alfred Kubin.[3]

In his 1985 book on contemporary American art, Edward Lucie-Smith stated "The presence of a visionary satirist of this quality in the ranks of Texan artists is one of the great surprises of an art scene which is surprising in many other ways as well."[9] His paintings allude to mêlées, violence, and ruin; yet presented absurdly, nearly comical at times, a seemingly incongruous combination with a troubling tone that resonate in his finest work. In one statement from 1980s Levers said "The work always has a layer of humor, I notice, even when the nominal subject is dead serious. I prefer not to consider this a limitation but instead an opportunity to make the picture richer". . . "I hope I live long enough to paint almost all - God forbid absolutely all - the pictures I think I can feel behind my forehead".[10]Levers died of a heart attack at the age of 61.[3]

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Curlee, Kendall (2010). Levers, Robert L. Jr. Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. (accessed July 28, 2019: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fleft).
  2. ^
    ISBN 0-8109-6706-5
    [with contributions by Shannon Halwes, Kathleen Robinson, Robert Montgomery, Monica Garza, Jason Goldstein, and Alejandra Jiménez]
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Grieder, Terence, Lee Chesney, and Gibbs Milliken (1995). Report of the Memorial Resolution Committee for Robert L. Levers Jr. 21054-21055 pp. (accessed July 28, 2019: https://wikis.utexas.edu/display/facultycouncil/Memorial+Resolutions?preview=%2F141736129%2F141736596%2Flevers.pdf
  4. ^ a b c d e f Grieder, Terence (1979). Robert Levers: Paintings, Drawings, and Constructions. University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 28 pp. Library of Congress Catalogue Card No. 79-51124
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i Meats, Peter, Terence Grieder, and Joan Seeman Robinson (1991). The Art of Robert Levers: A Retrospective. Laguna Gloria Art Museum. Austin Texas. 32 pp. Library of Congress Catalogue Card No. 91-075325
  6. ^ Tucker, Marcia, Ned Rifkin, and Lynn Gumpert (1984). Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade. Venice: La 41a Biennale de Venezia, United States Pavilion. New Museum of Contemporary Art,, New York. 127 pp.
  7. ISBN 978-9992172964
  8. ^
    ISBN 978-1477310083
  9. ISBN 0-688-05884-1
  10. ISBN 0-87701-399-3

External links
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