John Levee (1924-2017) was an American abstract expressionist painter. Having been born in California Levée attended the Institute of Art there with fellow students Mark Rothko, Clifford Still and Richard Diebenkorn, before finding himself in the Second World War fighting to liberate France in 1944. He arrived back in Paris in 1949 and enrolled at the avant-garde Academie Julian in 1950 where he met fellow American artist Sam Francis and worked 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, 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.
Over the course of his life, Levée exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1957 and 1958, the Whitney Museum NY in 1957, 1959 and 1965, Carnegie Institute 1958, Phoenix Museum of Art Arizona 1964, Palm Springs Museum 1977, among others. He also held regular exhibitions at Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York and in London at Gimpel Fils. A major retrospective of the artist’s work was held at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Toulouse in 1983.
Levee t is represented in numerous major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut; Museum of Fine Arts, Ohio; Cincinnati Museum, Ohio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas; Carnegie Institute, Pennsylvania; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Washington Gallery of Modern Art; Walker Arts Center, Minnesota; Whitney Museum of American Art; Basel; Haifa; Tel Aviv; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.