John Levee

John Levee (April 10, 1924 - January 18, 2017) was an American abstract expressionist painter who had worked in Paris since 1949. His father was M. C. Levee.[1]

Background

John Harrison Levee received a master's degree in philosophy from UCLA and became an aviator in the Second World War. After the war he decided to stay to work as a painter in Montparnasse. He studied art at the Art Center School in Los Angeles and at Académie Julian in Paris from 1949 to 1951.

His early painting was inspired by the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, which included Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, among others. After a period of hard-edge painting based on geometric abstraction in the 1960s, Levee returned to his more spontaneous Abstract Expressionism style, often using collage elements with loose brush work typical of lyrical abstraction.

Reference Works in Public Collections

Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel
MOMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Whitney Museum, New York, New York
Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York
Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington D.C.
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Haifa Museum, Haifa, Israel
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Dallas Museum of Art Contemporary, Texas
Palm Springs Desert Museum, California
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Washington, D.C.