The drawings of Benjamin Levy, which afford the viewer a fascinating glimpse into their creator’s enchanting and mysterious world, lend credence to Baudelaire’s dictum, “le beau est toujours bizarre.”  Certainly these works are beautiful: in their limber, probing line; in the elegant logic of either simple or complex compositions; and in their rich color or stark black and white.  And, they are no less strange.  A cast of characters distilled from Levy’s family history, life observation and his fecund imagination people his surreal, dream-like pictures.  Paradox abounds in this art: we see the interplay between the suggestive and the innocent; the comic and the serious; the childlike and the adult; the dreamlike and the rational.  No words are spoken by the “actors” in Levy’s tableaus.  Instead, they communicate with each other- and with us- through a silent, symbolic language which reverberates throughout these images.

Levy’s drawings have always been an essential part of his creative output, equally important to him as his endeavors in other mediums.  One notes, in the crisp Picassoesque ink renderings or the recurring theme of connubial bliss reminiscent of Chagall, his awareness of art history.  Levy’s drawings are not studies for his paintings, prints or sculpture, as he always works directly and spontaneously in any artistic avenue.  But these pictures, which are the most direct conduits from his subconscious, are an endless source of new images for his art.  Evident in these handsome efforts is his remarkable facility in graphite, ink, watercolor and gouache; his inexhaustible creativity; and also his great confidence as a draftsman.  Many of the images included in this publication were retained by this prolific artist from his vast output for his personal enjoyment; thus herein the viewer takes pleasure in ‘Levy’s Levys.”

Much of Levy’s narrative art is rooted in mythic family tales and remembrances.  Near the beginning of last century the artist’s grandfather died in Yemen.  His survivors, including Benjamin’s father, Ovadiah, set out on the long and arduous trek across the desert to the spiritual Jewish homeland in Palestine.  Ovadiah’s mother and infant brother succumbed along the way, leaving the teenage lad and his even younger sister to enter Jaffa alone.  Hardship continued to visit Ovadiah Levy as an adult, as his wife and their twin offspring died.  But he remarried at the age of forty to Batsheva, a fourteen-year-old orphan whose Sephardic Jewish parents had migrated from Turkey and Yugoslavia, and they raised eleven children, including Benjamin.  To shelter his family, Ovadiah built one of the first homes in Tel Aviv, near the beach in what would become the Yemenite quarter.  He supported his brood as a peddler of nuts, sees and candy, as well as birds and fish (which appear frequently in Benjamin’s art, as do many other creatures).

In the Levy household, where an infant was born every other year, new life abounded.  The center of domestic activity was a large balcony, where Batsheva sat at the large table and prepared the meals while the frenetic youngsters frolicked.  Mindful of their parents’ instruction, the older siblings dutifully looked after the younger.  The incessant chatter of the birds that inhabited the roof of the house-roosters, chickens and pigeons-only added to the ongoing childish cacophony.  In the artist’s enchanting images, childhood remains a gently surreal, magical time of life.

Yet, reality intruded abruptly and brutally into Levy’s youth.  During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the nine-year old Benjamin sustained a serious leg injury and spent nine months recuperating in the hospital.  The experience gave him pause, even at such a tender age, to reconsider his priorities and outlook on life, and he determined thenceforth never to take so much as a moment for granted.  Having missed a full year’s studies, the youngster was sent by his parents to a boarding school in Pardes Hannna.  There he found difficulty in adjusting to his new circumstances and struggled with classroom work, confounded—unbeknownst to himself and his instructors—by severe dyslexia.  Fortunately, his thoughtful mentors, Moshe Tokier, and kindly art teacher Tamar Licht nurtured his obvious artistic talents.

As a young man, Levy was employed for a time as a photoengraver in Haifa, and he later worked while studying art in Paris.  After a period when he traveled extensively, he returned to Tel Aviv.  There Benjamin not only set up a studio at his parents’ home but also married Hanna Vroman, a native Israeli musician of Dutch parentage.  But in 1965 the couple abandoned their comfortable life in their homeland for New York City, where the artist has since garnered great acclaim and success.  They and their four children (now striking young adults) have for years summered in Tel Aviv and spent the winters in New York.  Levy maintains studios in the aforementioned cities and also in an artists’ colony in Ein-Hod.  Now, as before, family is a central focus in the artist’s life and continues to have lasting effect upon his art.

Since its inception in 1839, photography has influenced the art of many who have worked in the traditional mediums of drawing, painting, printmaking  and sculpture.  Eminent creators such as Edgar Degas, Charles Sheller or Pablo Picasso are but a few who have drawn upon photography as a source of reference at various times during their careers.  Similarly, a stack of old family photographs he encountered at his sister’s home more than thirty years ago has proven to be a most important source of inspiration for Benjamin Levy.  Enamored of the medium’s ability to capture his loved ones for posterity, Ovadiah Levy drew together his kindred whenever an itinerant cameraman passed through.  These images, many of which predate the artist’s birth in 1940, function as a much more than mere aides de memoire; rather, they serve as points of departure for Levy’s boundless imagination, and they also provide insights into his art.  For example, an informal, open-air group portrait from 1938 includes not only Benjamin’s parents and eight siblings but also a neighborhood boy who (yielding to local superstition) was asked to stand in for an absent brother.  The lad’s shielding of his face to cover his extra familial identity lends a certain quirkiness to an already amateurish document.  Clearly based upon this image are My Family (1985) and My Family on the Beach (1990), restrained, nostalgic interpretations which transport parents and children to a time and place for frolic far away from the actual setting of the photograph.  Indeed, a series of Family Silhouettes is based on the same photograph, and in each the viewer encounters various realms of the artist’s fertile imagination.  These lyrical, photographically inspired drawings are like a child’s blissful remembrances; within each, time is suspended and reality merges with fantasy.

The inherent theatrical quality of much of Levy’s art also owes, in part, to the influence of these studio photographs.  The “actors,” attired in their distinctive ethnic costumes, were coached by the “director,” who artfully posed them on a “stage” replete with various props and an illusionistic painted backdrop.  The “scene” of course, is now frozen in time.  Interiors derived from remembrances of his parents’ home also function as “sets” for many Levy drawings.  In such a dwelling, the artist recalls, a simple fabric flap—behind which the inhabitants could hide whatever they wished—served more as a blind than barrier between rooms.  This device appears in several drawings, such as My Family (1985).  Therein, a curious structure resembling a curtained stage encloses all the dramatis personae except for one who attends “in the wings.”   Similarly, levy uses the window as a vantage point from which his characters may observe the scene.  By separating the “players” who appear to be awaiting a cue, the drapery or window help to establish a sense of enigma and anticipation.

In many drawings Levy recounts family legends or weaves his parents’ instructive parables into his art.  In the romantic tale of Batsheva and Ovadiah, for instance, the artist’s father recalled that on their wedding day his bride blushed so brightly that he felt she was arriving to the ceremony naked.  This charming anecdote, an amalgam of the sensual and the chaste, is also the basis for drawings such as The Marriage (2003), Getting Ready For the Wedding (1998) and The Tailor (2000).  The Musicians at the Wedding (no date) reflects the artist’s ability to suggest a childlike view of the world even as he makes adult observations.  Out-of-scale musicians are at the center of attention, their frenetic playing suggested by the implied movement of the performers’ cubistic faceted faces and the tangle of arms.  The musicians’ multiple eyes harken to the magical fish Ovadiah Levy described to his young son, fish who double lenses allowed them to see above and below the water simultaneously.  Perhaps the musicians, endowed like the fish with greater acuity, can see the future of the newlyweds whose world is now as circumscribed by their marriage as their appearance is by the mirror.

Levy’s art, however, is not concerned solely with kin.  The artist has long visited favorite themes through the use of imaginary characters or “types” drawn from personal observation.  A recurrent topic in Levy’s art is the nature of communication, especially between the sexes.  A most subtle and silent form of exchange is non-verbal language- gesture, glance, and posture- and Levy reveals to us many adult guises, sometimes humorously but always perceptively.  For instance, in Tying the Knot (1999) and Tying the Communication Knot (1998), couples are literally and symbolically linked by the slender string that stretches between their lips, the permanence of their bonds underscored by the solid, symmetrical compositions.  The unspoken dialogue between men and women and their angels or animal companions is apparent in My Friend Luis Bravo (1991), The Young Solider (1993), Gentleman, Moon and Bird (2003), Bathing (1996), Angel on a Bicycle (1998), Hanna’s Conversation with Her Angel (1999) and Jerry in Communication (1997), to name but a few.  The intent stare of the beauty in Balancing Act-Woman (no date) curiously beckons the viewer even as it keeps him at a distance.  The tiny ball, so precariously balanced near the figure’s mouth, is a symbol of capricious nature oh human affairs.  Whom do we trust?  How can we be certain?

No doubt recalling his brother Daniel’s deafness, Levy also ponders the failure of communication, or isolation.  In The Perfect Gentlemen (1997), The Man and His Rooster (1997) or Steamimg (1993) he depicts men isolated in various ways to remind us that we are confined and ultimately conform to our positions or roles.  The Young Solider (1993) humorously recalls Oz’s hapless Tin Man.  Trapped in an absurd, tightly-fitted military tunic and standing in spare, cell-like surroundings, this woebegone warrior is a study in detachment.  The key protruding from an ear on his rectilinear head, as it from a lock, signals his remove, while the plume of smoke pouring from the vent of his pot-helmet bespeaks his pent-up frustration.  The wittily ironic Let Me Hear You Sing (1994), created on a found support, goes even further by imprisoning an ostensibly deaf vocalist literally and figuratively within a box of silence.  In My Family on the Beach (1983), an image set in the outdoors, a child suggests his psychological distance from the group by shielding his eyes.

A number of the drawings clearly plump the psyche and divulge the nature of dreams.  Levy’s free association of images drawn from both conscious and subconscious sources leads to bizarre tableaus.  In The Visit (1991) elements of the recumbent dreamer’s (hence Levy’s) reverie surface; among them, the hunchbacked figures (Ovadiah, who carried his sister across the desert on his back); the zoomorphic nude with the cock’s head (Batsheva, who dispensed wisdom with counsel such as “Observe the chicken: after each drink of water it raises its head to thank God): the centaur-like creature who connotes our instinctual or unreasoned behaviors;  and the cleric whose yo-yo refers to the tenuousness of human existence.  The various hats- yarmulke, fez, or fedora- not only lend a certain identity to their wearers, but also serve as reminders of the many lands, cultures, and journeys which are woven into the fabric of Levy’s family and his art.

Through the wizardry of his drawings, Benjamin Levy whisks us into the mystical locus of his imagination.  In this strange and paradoxical world, figure from the artist’s life and subconscious meet at the crossroads of reality and dreams.  Like the director of some otherworldly mime theater, Levy with pen and brush sets his stage and positions his players upon it.  Magically, these characters speak to each other and to us with the wordless dialogue which echoes in the silence.

Daniel Piersol

The Doris Zeummary Stone Curator Of Prints and Drawings

New Orleans Museum of Art

Fine Art for Established Collectors