Levin's career is the steady, lifelong working-through of a single position, that representational painting, in close observation of the world, can still carry the moral and social charge it had for the realist traditions of the nineteenth century, and that an artist's job is to keep finding new subjects for it.
Levin came to art from an unusually literary household. His father's novels, among them In Search and The Old Bunch, established him as one of the leading American Jewish writers of the mid-twentieth century, and his mother brought a scientist's training and intellectual rigor to the household. The result was a childhood thick with books, ideas, and political conversation, and a young man who arrived at art school with a clear sense that painting was capable of carrying serious narrative and social weight.
His refusal to follow the dominant abstract idiom of the period was a matter of conviction rather than incapacity. By the time he reached Boston, the New York School and its East Coast institutional supporters had effectively defined the terms of advanced American painting, and his commitment to a representational practice rooted in the narrative tradition of nineteenth-century European art and the American Ashcan and WPA schools placed him outside the consensus. The decision cost him his graduation; it also gave him a clear artistic identity from a young age.
The move to Santa Fe positioned him within one of the few American art communities still hospitable to figurative and regional work, and his early years there, including his time tending bar at Claude's, the legendary Santa Fe dive, provided the immediate material for the bar-room and dance-hall paintings that would become his first signature subject. The works are color-saturated, narratively dense, and loosely caricatural in their handling of the figure, and they read as a sustained, mostly affectionate satire of a particular Santa Fe demimonde.
His commitment to building artist communities runs in close parallel to his painting. He founded the Tuesday Night Drawing Group as a working figure-drawing session for local artists in the late 1960s, and a decade later established the Santa Fe Etching Club around an etching press that had previously belonged to Will Shuster, the founding member of Los Cinco Pintores and printer to John Sloan, anchoring his print practice in a direct historical line back to the early Santa Fe modernists. He has also written art criticism and run galleries within the Santa Fe scene.
The publication of Santa Fe Bohemia, his memoir of the city's late twentieth-century art world, consolidated his second role as a chronicler of his own scene. His paintings, prints, and drawings continue to be collected and exhibited across the Southwest, and his standing today is that of a senior representative of the Santa Fe realist tradition, a working painter who has spent more than half a century making the case, in paint and in writing, for a representational art that takes its world seriously.