JOHN LEVEE by Nicholson, Simon - 1961

London: Gimpel Fils. Very Good. 1961. First Edition. Paperback. 12 pages; Clean and secure in original stiff white wrappers; very faint toning at edges. Catalogue of an exhibition held at Gimpel Fils, London, commencing 7th Nov., 1961. 5 works illustrated (1 in colour). OCLC 1011987297 (eleven copies cited). John Levee (April 10, 1924 – January 18, 2017) was an American abstract expressionist painter who had worked in Paris since 1949. John Harrison Levee received a master's degree in philosophy from UCLA and became an aviator in the Second World War. After the war he decided to stay to work 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, Ad Reinhardt, 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. .