John Levee

John Levee (April 10, 1924 – January 18, 2017) was an American abstract expressionist painter who had worked in Paris since 1949. His father was M. C. Levee.

Background
John Harrison Levee received a master's degree in philosophy from UCLA and became an aviator in the Second World War. After the war he decided to stay to work as a painter in Montparnasse. He studied art at the Art Center School in Los Angeles and at Académie Julian in Paris from 1949 to 1951.

His early painting was inspired by the New York School of abstract expressionism, which included Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, among others. After a period of hard-edge painting based on geometric abstraction in the 1960s, Levee returned to his more spontaneous abstract expressionist style, often using collage elements with loose brush work typical of lyrical abstraction.

Reference works in public collections

 * Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel
 * MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
 * Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
 * Whitney Museum, New York, New York
 * Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York
 * Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington D.C.
 * Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
 * Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
 * Haifa Museum, Haifa, Israel
 * Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
 * Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
 * Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
 * Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohi
 * Dallas Museum of Art Contemporary, Texas
 * Palm Springs Desert Museum, California
 * Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida
 * Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Washington, D.C.