Marion Lerner-Levine

Marion Lerner-Levine, artist and printmaker, died peacefully of natural causes on October 26, 2023, at age 92. She suffered from progressive Alzheimer's disease for several years and had many loving caregivers along the way. She was a resident of Park Slope, Brooklyn for over 50 years. She worked in various media throughout her long career, including oil painting, watercolor, drawing and printmaking, exploring still lifes and landscapes in unique ways. She also loved classical music and sang for many years in the Grace Chorale of Brooklyn. She taught art classes at U.C.L.A., Brooklyn College, and was a visiting artist at the Art institute of Chicago. In later years she worked as an indexer and was a member of the American Society of Indexers.

She was an early and longtime member of the Prince Street Gallery, joining in 1971 and was active in the feminist art movement in the 1970's and 80's. She had numerous solo exhibits and her paintings and etchings have been seen at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Butler Institute of American Art and the National Academy Museum among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Bellevue Hospital, the U.S. State Department, Citibank, Bank of America and the Bates College Art Museum in Lewiston, Maine. Her original artwork hangs in several hotels across the country including the Grand Floridian and Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.

Lerner-Levine was honored with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gottlieb Foundation, and the NY Foundation for the Arts. She had three residencies at the Yaddo Foundation artist's colony where she enjoyed her time and made many lasting friendships.

In 2005 she held a 30-year retrospective at the Prince St. Gallery. The retrospective included her large oil paintings of the "Italian tomato can series", watercolor still-life arrangements on lace with objects that she collected such as old postcards, antique books, old teapots, and jewelry. She also showed landscape etchings inspired by a trip to the green fields and winding fences of West Yorkshire, England and Wales.

She was featured in the book; "100 New York Painters by Cynthia Danzic"; In it Levine described her work at the time as "tablescapes", saying "I paint from direct observation but allow surreal elements into my work, trying to transform still life into a poetic whole turning description into interpretation." She is also included in "Better Than Ever-Women Figurative Artists of the '70's Soho Co-ops"; a 2008 catalog from a traveling exhibit, curated and edited by Sharyn Finnegan and "North American Women Artists" of the Twentieth Century by Jules and Nancy Heller.

Her shows were reviewed in several newspapers and magazines over the years:

"Her work displays the imagination of an artist unafraid of stretching and transcending the boundaries imposed by concepts like time and space...Even more intriguing are her older paintings, which have a continuity of subject matter that transcends normal restrictions imposed by our use of three-dimensional space." (Ellen Lubell, in the Village Voice, 1978)

"Levine has always had a wonderful knack of using pre-iconized material and Incorporating it into new and charming work. In early paintings she did still lifes with tins and cans that had landscape implications such as those tomato cans with pictures of an Italian region on the label. What is most admirable in this show is the artists commitment to painterly values. Levine paints with respect for detail without slavishly copying it . Throughout it all the personal remains the dominant personal touch." (Robert Seivert ARITZINE, VOL 7, 2002.1)

In January of 2020, she exhibited for the last time, as part of a group show for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Prince Street Gallery. By then, she was already in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease, but she was surrounded by people who remembered her and admired her work and she enjoyed herself immensely.

Lerner-Levine and her twin brother Lionel were born in London in 1931 to renowned economist Abba P. Lerner and Alice Sendak. They emigrated to the United States when she was six years old. She attended Hunter College high school and then entered the University of Chicago at age 16 and later received a BFA in printmaking and painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also joined the Chicago Graphic Workshop studying etching and lithography where she met and married fellow artist Arthur Levine in 1954. They were divorced in 1987. She is survived by her brother Lionel, daughters Ellen and Julia Levine, and grandsons, Henry Haprov and Dylan Riley.