Word: muralism
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Muralist Sol Levenson has just painted a woman bending over to pick apples. One minute she is in the foreground and the next, her apple-picking days are over. Levenson decides to white her out of the picture. "She was getting all the attention. In a mural, there must be interest all over," he explains. "Besides, I'm so happy making a mistake. Here's a chance to make it better. When you get so old that you don't know you're making mistakes, then it's time to worry...
Levenson, 95, has no time to worry. He is busy with his current project, a three-panel portrayal of the Civil War at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon, N.H., where since 1990 he has painted 17 historical murals. (Among his other subjects: the Shaker sect, Native Americans and a New England fair.) He is also writing a book on the history of drawing, teaching female inmates at a Vermont state prison how to make a landscape mural and starting sketches for a portrait commission. Oh, and this fall he's off on a Fulbright fellowship to Colombia...
...hones. While watching a boxing match on television at home, for instance, he will turn away and draw what he has seen. "I freeze it in my mind and make the sketches," he says. "It's what I call my roadwork." A stickler for historical accuracy, he researches his murals in libraries and specialized museums. For his Civil War mural, a member of the hospital staff who belongs to a Civil War re-enactment group gave Levenson photos of Union and Confederate uniforms. The painter confers with him regularly to make sure even the smallest details are right, from...
...given evening, he might sketch changes he wants to make the next day on his Civil War mural or work on his book or review Spanish grammar so he'll be ready for South America or ponder how he is going to compose a concert scene for a recently commissioned mural. "While working on one mural, I make sketches for the next and think about the third," he says. "I'm like a theater stock company that does one play a week, rehearsing next week's play and reading the play for the week after!" For performing his repertory...
...Ever since Jackson Pollock and the first abstract expressionists began enlarging their canvases back in the late 1940s, American paintings have been getting bigger and bigger. To show the lengths?and heights?that artists are going to nowadays, Manhattan's Jewish Museum this week put on display 23 mural-size paintings ... The largest, Al Held's Greek Garden, is a breathtaking panorama of cabalistic circles, squares and triangles that measures 12 ft. [3.5 m] high?and 56 ft. [17 m] long. The museum's curator, Kynaston McShine, who selected the paintings, unpretentiously bills his exhibit as an 'airy, informal, summer...