Eli Levin’s etchings for The Seven Deadly Sins, featuring lyrics from R & B songs (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966):
From the collection of Richard Sica
Pride
“I’ve got forty-seven miles of barbed wire / I use a cobra snake for a necktie…” – Bo Diddley
Avarice
Lust
Wrath
Envy
Despair
Gluttony
This one includes a poem by Diego Rivera:
During the time of our experiment
I discovered that I liked to eat
The legs and breasts of women,
For as in other animals,
These parts are delicacies.
I also savored young women’s breaded ribs.
Best of all, however,
I relish women’s brains in vinegar sauce.
Here’s a bio of the artist from the Sara Smith Gallery:
Born 1938 in Chicago, Illinois, Levin attended Diploma, Music and Art High School in New York City. In 1961 after receiving his B.A. in Literature at New School for Social Research, New York, Levin moved to Boston. There he was expelled from the Museum School’s graduate program for both experimenting with egg tempera (an early Renaissance medium) and painting too realistically. One of his professors had insisted that Levin paint abstractly with oil or he would flunk him. In 1964 Eli Levin moved to New Mexico where the art scene was relaxed enough to accomodate Levin’s desire to pursue figurative painting. When he arrived in Santa Fe, the old art colony had all but disappeared, but he became friends with Louie Ewing and Arthur Haddock who made him feel as though he were a contiguous part of the New Mexico tradition. He briefly went to University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1965 to finish his M.A. in Art. In 1991 Levin returned to school to get an M.A. in Humanities at St. John’s College, Santa Fe. In 1993 Eli Levin changed his name to Jo Basiste, after his paternal grandfather. At this time he abandoned his bar scenes and starting painting mythological subject matter. Levin has been an art critic for several newspapers, including the Albuquerque Journal North, the Santa Fe Reporter and the Philadelphia Enquirer. Since 1985 to the present, he has held an etching workshop at his studio.
Levin is best known for his bar and dance-hall scenes of social commentary. These paintings are full of color with a distortion of form to express humanity satirically. His work has been influenced by the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, American painters Thomas Hart Benton and John Sloan among others.
Previous posts from Richard Sica’s collection:
Les Fleurs du Skull
Whettering the Scythe
Suffocating in the Villa des Charmes
A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles
L’Abbé de l’Abbaye
Alexeieff’s Queen of Spades
Alexeieff’s Fall
Ex Libris Mr. Reaper
La Danse Macabre
The Sphinx
Ex Bibliotheca Macabrum
