David Levine

Like Lewis Carroll, who might have imagined he would be remembered for his book on mathematics rather than the one he wrote for Alice, David Levine assumed that his claim to fame would rest on his watercolors. In an earlier age it would have. His paintings were on par with the very best of the previous century, including works by John Constable and Winslow Homer. But when he died on Dec. 29 at age 83, it was as a caricaturist that he was remembered and celebrated.

Like his paintings, his caricatures owed much to a 19th century aesthetic. The link between the crosshatching technique of the French cartoonist André Gill and the methods of the Brooklyn-born Levine is unmistakable, but to readers of Esquire in the early 1960s, Levine's style seemed refreshingly different. Soon the painter who regarded caricature as just a sideline also found himself illustrating for New York magazine and Harper's, drawing covers for TIME and appearing regularly in a new publication, the New York Review of Books.

Levine joined the Review shortly after it was launched in 1963. Within a year, Vietnam would turn the literary journal into a political one as well, opening the door for Levine to produce the most trenchant protest art of the period. His caricature of Lyndon Johnson pulling up his shirt to reveal a Vietnam-shaped scar on his abdomen (a parody of a photo Johnson had posed for) was circulated around the world.

But if his political caricatures seethed with outrage, the man himself was gentle--he was happiest in a museum, studying Titian and Tintoretto, or with friends at his Wednesday-night life-drawing class, which he co-hosted for half a century.

Sorel, a cartoonist, has illustrated many magazine covers and children's books