David Levine is dead. He was the house illustrator for the New York review of Books for something like half a century. His stuff was completely amazing, His stuff was more or less forgotten as the years went by and he went increasingly blind. more's the tragedy.
I first saw David Levine's work back in the 1960s. He was at his prime then, and his caracatures were on the covers of most of the major magazines at the time. His pictures of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were stunning. I didn't start following his career until I was in college in the middle 1970s and wanted to follow in his footsteps. His mastery of crosshatching and his eye for detail were unparralelled. Due to my diminished status I cannot upload stuff, so here's the only one of his drawings on photobucket:
If you go to the New York Review of Books site,, you'll get to see a gallery of his work. The link goes directly to his final work, Barack Obama from 2006. It's not his best work, his powers were fading fast, but go back to 1968, when they were at their height, then you can see what greatness really was.
The great tragedy of his life was taxes. The IRS knew what a great artist he was, and as the end approached, his family was scared that the valuation of his work might bankrupt his family through the estate taxes. They considered destroying most if it, and I don't know the final outcome.