John Levee American, 1924-2017

John Levée was an American Abstract Expressionist painter whose career bridged the New York and Paris art worlds in the postwar decades. Born in California, he studied at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, where he was part of a generation that included artists such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Richard Diebenkorn. His early life was interrupted by military service during World War II, during which he participated in the liberation of France in 1944. This experience led to a lasting connection with Europe, and in 1949 he returned to Paris, enrolling at the Académie Julian, where he met fellow American painter Sam Francis.

Levée’s early work was strongly influenced by the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, particularly artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell. His paintings from this period emphasized gestural brushwork, dynamic composition, and an expressive use of color. In the 1960s, he briefly shifted toward a more structured, hard-edge abstraction characterized by geometric clarity, before returning to a freer, more spontaneous mode aligned with lyrical abstraction. His later works often incorporated collage elements and layered surfaces, combining painterly immediacy with compositional refinement.

Over the course of his career, Levée exhibited widely in major institutions in both the United States and Europe. His work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957 and 1958, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in multiple exhibitions throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. He also exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Palm Springs Desert Museum, among others, and maintained long-standing relationships with galleries such as André Emmerich Gallery and Gimpel Fils in London. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Toulouse in 1983.

Levée’s paintings are represented in numerous important public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, among many others in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Throughout his long career, he remained committed to abstraction, developing a body of work that reflects both the energy of Abstract Expressionism and the evolving language of postwar painting.