Seagoing Southpaw

To a few painters, fame comes easily and early, with the rolling drums of ballyhoo. This week Manhattan is having a look at a one-man show by Julian Levi, who has built himself a reputation the slow, hard, un-pressagented way. A slight, soft-spoken man with a fierce walrus moustache, Southpaw Painter Levi weathered the depression as a WPArtist, has since sold his work to 15 ranking U.S. museums. His quiet, low-keyed canvases now bring from $350 to $1,500.

In 1920, with a scholarship from the Pennsylvania Academy and some financial help from his parents, he set out for a look at the artistic life of France. His trip stretched into a four-year stay, during which he studied, worked and learned to carry a sketch pad wherever he went--even when he ventured into Paris' high-kicking night life. Unlike many a French-influenced U.S. painter who works his way toward the abstract, Levi plunged early into abstractions and progressed back toward a sort of poetic realism with surrealist overtones. A slow worker who produces less than a dozen pictures a year, he finally got around to his first one-man Manhattan show just five years ago, when he was 40.

Collectors, studying this week's small show with restrained excitement, found that Julian Levi's most effective subject is still the fringe of the sea and the desolation of marine marshlands. "Outstanding was Red Dory (see cut), a haunting strip of beach featuring the crazy profiles of salt-soaked wood forms, two laboring human, figures, three gasping, landlocked boats.

Painter Levi alternates his sketching on the beach with work in a Manhattan studio that is cluttered knee-deep with marine subject matter: old oars, cork floats, shells, broken pilings, sandpiper decoys, fishnets and other briny flotsam & jetsam. His new show at the Downtown Gallery--ten sea-dominated landscapes and four portraits--is probably a fairly proportioned cross section of the artist's enthusiasms. Says he: "As a secondary interest, I cherish the human physiognomy."

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