Ask any curator of a major public art gallery to talk about the collection in his or her charge and they will converse on the subject enthusiastically for as long as their busy schedule allows. For curators are salesmen at heart. How else can they obtain the public and private funds necessary to run their gallery? And how else can they persuade those private collectors and artists whose lives are near their end to bequeath works of art? In these days when the public purse is inelastic and the private one subject to the balance sheet a bequest is an important and cheap way of adding to a gallery's permanent collection. Ordinarily a curator will be as happy to discuss a bequeathed painting as much any other, more so if it is likely to generate additional publicity for the gallery. However were you to ask that same curator "what became of the Hyman Levy bequest" you might be greeted with an embarrassed silence.
Hyman Levy, as anyone familiar with art knows, was one of the last of that post war generation of American artists that included Pollock, Rothko, De Kooning, Gorky and Newman. Some would say that he was the best of them all. He was certainly the most fortunate. Unlike many of his contemporaries he was untouched by the kind of alcoholism and depression that leads to early death or suicide. Also, unlike De Kooning, in old age he retained his faculties, producing great and important work right up to his death. Many artists show early promise or late maturity. Levy was that rare bird, an artist who retained his vitality and vision throughout his artistic life. The only mystery is just how long that life actually lasted. He arrived in the USA as a young child and if the dates recorded at the time are correct he was almost a hundred when he died. However there is some doubt about the authenticity of these records and Levy may have been several years younger. But whatever his actual date of birth what is not disputed is that Levy continued to paint into his nineties.
It is difficult to place such a long-lived and prolific artist into any particular movement. Like many of his contemporaries Levy began in a semi-cubist style before falling under the influence of the painter and teacher Hans Hofmann. Thereafter his paintings became more abstract flirting with, but never quite mirroring, the work of the action painters and colour theorists of his day. On the odd occasion when he gave interviews Levy was careful to distance himself from any movement. "Just look at the damn work" was all he would say, as he puffed on his trademark cigar.
Perhaps he was unwilling to be associated with something that could so easily turn into a straightjacket to his creativity. If so, his instincts proved correct because once he had exhausted a particular line of enquiry in his work he never felt burdened by his past and was able to move on to something new. Movements came and went but Levy remained unmoved and untouched by them. He had been a devotee of bebop in his youth and likened his "journey" to that of a jazzman searching for a lost sound.
"I'll hear it one day and then you'll find me slumped at my easel, dead and gone."
Even the loss of the sight in one eye did not prevent him working, though it did slow him down and he was always irritated whenever an interviewer referred to it.
"Do ya think I need two eyes to paint? Did Django need ten fingers to play the guitar? Hell I'm not playing handball ya know. Having one eye helps me focus more on my work, without the distraction of the other eye, which might end up watching the TV or a pretty gal because it didn't have enough to do. Anyhow art is all a matter of attitude. Having one eye never stopped Andre De Toth from making those 3D movies."
Levy did indeed die slumped by his easel. A man of regular habits, he had failed to turn up for his evening glass of bourbon, one of the few luxuries he allowed himself in later years, the cigars having been abandoned on doctor's orders. His estate was valued at several millions. Some of this passed to his only surviving wife from one of his three failed marriages, as well as numerous children and grandchildren. The Estate also established the "Levy endowment" to support and promote new artists. But what caused the greatest excitement in the art world was the announcement of the "Levy bequest".
At the time of his death Levy had been working on a new series of paintings though no one admitted to having actually seen them, not even those of his friends who were still alive. Upon completion each painting had been wrapped in sacking and stacked in a corner of Levy's studio. According to the terms of the bequest every major public gallery in the world was to be given one of these paintings. To avoid the kind of jealousy that would have led to internecine struggles between rival galleries the paintings were selected at random, whilst still covered. They were then crated and shipped, at no cost to the gallery in question. Apart from the selection process itself no other condition was placed on the bequest and in due course the paintings began to arrive. Some galleries used this as an opportunity to present a retrospective of Levy's work. Others allocated a particular room to the painting. Some simply displayed it in whichever gallery room seemed appropriate. Almost all had souvenir postcards printed.
Among the many famous paintings in a public gallery few stand out. One would have expected that, after an initial fuss, each Levy would merge into the comparative anonymity of the respective gallery's collection but this isn't what happened. There is a medical condition known as the Stendhal Syndrome, which affects a small percentage of people when they are confronted with outstanding works of art. The effect of seeing such works is so overpowering that the sufferer often faints. The late works of Levy produce a similar effect though with a markedly different manifestation. "Levy Syndrome" was first noted among gallery visitors who spent a long time staring at his painting. Only a small percentage of people were affected, as most visitors rarely spent more than a minute on each painting they looked at, but when set against the number of actual visitors to a gallery the figure was alarming. When questioned those who were affected all gave more or less the same answer. After looking at the painting for a time the colours began to shimmer and swirl until it seemed as if it was around instead of in front of them. Most disconcerting of all each felt a loosening of the bowel, so that they were forced to dash to the nearest toilet. In short the Levy bequest brought some visitors to the verge of incontinence. Levy Syndrome only occurred with those paintings that formed part of the bequest and, to use a pun, the writing was on the wall. Every gallery was forced to move their bequest to the basement, where it remained once more covered in sacking to protect gallery workers from its effects.
One critic, Howard Schimmelfarb, risked the effects of the syndrome to study the Levy held in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum. His subsequent article, which appeared in the New Yorker and was later reprinted in several publications at the time, makes for interesting reading. Schimmelfarb too suffered from the syndrome but suggested that this was in part due to the very newness of the work. Good art, he maintained, is created with posterity in mind. In the case of the Levy bequest it may be that today's public is not yet ready for these works but that future generations, those attuned to video games and computers for example, might be able to fully appreciate them without any ill effect?
Perhaps, Schimmelfarb opined, Levy had found that "lost sound" that he was searching for. Perhaps these late works would turn out to be the key to the future development of art itself and though the jury is out it may be that Levy was truly an artist ahead of his time.