By STEVEN HELLER
c.2009 New York Times News Service
Caricature works wonders at skewering puffed-up demigods, moguls and celebrities by ripping off their false facades. For artists it is both a vent for frustration and a tool of dissent, but being good at it is never easy. Just getting a good likeness is hard enough; making it into a truly smart distortion takes a master manipulator.
From the mid-’60s through the early 2000s, American caricature was most ingeniously and influentially practiced by the Brooklyn-born caricaturist and painter David Levine, who died at 83 on Dec. 29 of prostate cancer and other illnesses. Given the thousands of drawings he produced during his lengthy career, primarily for The New York Review of Books, but also for other periodicals, including Esquire, The New Yorker, Time and The New York Times, he laid claim to a distinctive linear style that was mimicked for decades by scores of less gifted cartoonists. The Levine line was as emblematic of his era – from the Vietnam War through the Iraq War, covering presidents from Kennedy to Obama – as were the graphic styles of the 19th- and early-20th-century cartoon luminaries Honore Daumier, Thomas Nast and George Grosz.
Levine’s caricature method was insightfully comic graphic commentary – exposes of truths laid bare. For instance, he transformed Lyndon B. Johnson’s proud exhibition of a recent abdominal surgery scar into a drawing of the president showing a scar in the shape of Vietnam. During Watergate, Levine took the movie image of the fictional paranoid Lt. Cmdr. Philip Francis Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny,” and replaced the head of Humphrey Bogart with that of a besieged Richard Nixon.