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.

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 expressionist 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, Ohi Dallas Museum of Art Contemporary, Texas Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Texas Palm Springs Desert Museum, California Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Washington, D.C. Museum of Modern Art André Malraux - MuMa, Le Havre, France , Issoudun, France Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio Smart Museum of Art, Chicago Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts