Ruth E Levine

1936 - 2010
Noted artist Ruth Eleanor Levine, nee Rubin, whose paintings graced museums and galleries in Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Prague, Venice and Florence, died Oct. 18 after a long illness. She was 74.

Ruth was renowned not only for her talent as an artist, but for her depth of knowledge in art history and her expertise in arts management. A native New Yorker, Ruth lived for more than three decades in Washington, D.C. She held positions at the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and was an adjunct faculty member of American University. When she and her husband moved to Pittsburgh in 1998, Ruth came to fall in love with the city and its arts culture. She served on the boards of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, the Society for Contemporary Craft, the Pittsburgh City Theatre, and the Andy Warhol Museum.

Her connection with Warhol began many years ago. In the early 1980s, while she was the director of the School for the Visual Arts at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, Ruth got a call from Ron Feldman, owner of a well-known New York art gallery. He told her that Andy Warhol needed some suggestions of "great Jews" for a print series Warhol wanted to do on "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century." Thinking it a prank, Ruth glibly suggested the Marx Brothers, along with Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Golda Meir, George Gershwin, Franz Kafka, and Gertrude Stein. Six months later, the silk-screen prints arrived for their debut show at the Community Center, Marx Brothers and all. As Ruth recounted it, she "dined out on that story" for years.

Ruth, whose work can be seen at www.relevine.com, was a multi-media abstract artist. Her most recent solo shows were held this spring at Gallery 10 in Washington, D.C., and at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, after she had already become ill. The Pittsburgh show was "marvelous" and "miraculous," according to Tom Sokolowski, director of the Warhol Museum. Ruth was awarded the Arkus Prize from the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh in 2005, and was nominated for the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts' "2012 Artist of the Year." She co-curated the "Jews in the Age of Rembrandt" show of engravings, etchings and mezzotints at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1982, a show that The New York Times reviewed very favorably.

Ruth was born on March 24, 1936, in New York City. She attended Vassar College on a full scholarship, and later completed both BFA and MFA degrees at American University. She is survived by her husband, Arthur S. Levine, M.D., senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and dean, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh; daughter Amy and her partner Yun Peng, of Pittsburgh; daughter Raleigh, her husband Christopher Wood, and their son Sam, of St. Paul; and daughter Jennifer, her husband Phillip Guerini, and their daughter Noel, of Los Angeles.