Robert L. Levers, Jr.

Robert L. Levers Jr. was an American artist and painter. He was born April 11, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, and died February 6, 1992, in Austin, Texas. He received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. (1961) from Yale University, then joined the faculty of the University of Texas, Austin, where he taught and painted for the rest of his life. His paintings explore conflict, chaos, destruction, and apocalyptic themes with a mordant humor.

Early life and education Robert L. Levers Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1930, the son of Robert L. Levers, Sr., an Englishman with artistic interests, and Gertrude (Burrow) Levers. He attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and received a B.F.A. in 1952. In the early 1950s he was a teacher at the Whitney Art School in New Haven, Connecticut, and also worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York City. Levers married Mary Lou Schlichting in 1954 and they had two daughters and a son. He served as a gunnery officer in the United States Navy from 1954 to 1957, mostly in the Caribbean during peacetime. After his service in the Navy, he worked at the "Famous Artists School", a correspondence school based in Westport, Connecticut, where he learned how to teach, and further develop his drawing skills. He returned to Yale University, where he studied under Josef Albers and earned his M.F.A. in 1959 to 1961. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Columbia Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1959 and his work was included in an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1960. Levers taught at Yale for one year before moving to Texas.

Career and exhibitions In 1961, Levers joined the faculty of the University of Texas, Austin, where he taught painting and drawing until his death in 1992. He received several honors, including a Ford Foundation Faculty Grant, teaching-excellence awards in 1963 and 1984, and he was named the Leslie Waggener Professor of Fine Arts in 1987.

Robert Levers work has been shown throughout the United States; he listed 135 "selected exhibitions" on his CV.

Robert Levers's paintings have been exhibited in several art museums in Texas including: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Dallas Museum of Art; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Blanton Museum of Art (Huntington Art Gallery), Austin; Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Abilene Fine Arts Museum; Amarillo Art Center; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; El Paso Museum of Art; Tyler Museum of Art; Waco Art Center. In 1991 a retrospective exhibit of his work was organized by Austin's Laguna Gloria Art Museum; it toured Texas in 1991 and 1992.

Stylistic development, and subjects Early Work 1950-1972: Although Levers exhibited during the late 1950s through the early 1970s, his work before 1973 is absent from exhibition catalogues after 1973 and his retrospective exhibit in 1991. His paintings allude to mêlées, violence, and ruin; yet presented absurdly, nearly comical at times, a seemingly incongruous combination with a troubling tone that resonate in his finest work. In one statement from 1980s Levers said "The work always has a layer of humor, I notice, even when the nominal subject is dead serious. I prefer not to consider this a limitation but instead an opportunity to make the picture richer". . . "I hope I live long enough to paint almost all - God forbid absolutely all - the pictures I think I can feel behind my forehead". Levers died of a heart attack at the age of 61.