Eli Levin is a defining figure of Santa Fe's late twentieth-century realist tradition — a sustained dissenter from the abstract orthodoxies of his generation whose narrative paintings of bars, dance halls, and street life have made him one of the most distinctive social realists working in the American Southwest.
Eli Levin (born 1938, Chicago, Illinois) is an American realist painter, printmaker, writer, and longtime fixture of the Santa Fe art world. The son of the novelist Meyer Levin and the chemist Mable Schamp, he grew up in a left-leaning intellectual household and entered the Boston Museum School in 1960. His refusal to abandon representational painting in favor of the prevailing New York School abstraction led to his being denied graduation, and in 1964 he moved to Santa Fe, where he has lived and worked ever since.
His painting belongs to the tradition that runs from early Renaissance and nineteenth-century narrative realism through the Ashcan School and the Federal Art Project realists of the 1930s. He works principally in egg tempera, alongside oil, watercolor, and intaglio printmaking, and is best known for the bar, dance-hall, street, and figure scenes that he developed across the 1970s and 1980s as the basis of his social commentary. He founded two of the longest-running artists' gatherings in Santa Fe — the Tuesday Night Drawing Group in 1969 and the Santa Fe Etching Club around 1980 — and his work is held in the collections of the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, among other institutions. His memoir, Santa Fe Bohemia, is one of the principal first-hand accounts of the Santa Fe art world of the late twentieth century.