Precocious Pencil

Detroit's Archives of American Art is part museum, part scrapbook and part vacuum cleaner. Since it was founded seven years ago, its staff has scoured the U.S. for material on U.S. artists, collectors, critics and dealers. On the theory that what may seem trivial today could be important tomorrow, the Archives will accept or buy just about anything. It has more than a million original and microfilmed items, among them Benjamin West's wine bills, poems written by Albert Ryder, a Lyonel Feininger sketchbook, the notes and papers of Walt Kuhn. Last week it announced an offbeat donation from Painter Jack Levine--108 drawings that show his prodigious childhood talent.

Levine, who is now 47, remembers doing the first drawings--sprightly Chinese figures with pigtails, Keystone Kops in domed helmets, rattling horse-drawn carts--when he was seven or eight. At the time, he had just begun studying with a young painter named Harold Zimmerman, whom he had met at the Jewish Welfare Center in Roxbury, Mass. For the next eight years he worked after school, turning out drawing after drawing of things he had seen. He rarely used a model; as he does today, Levine worked almost entirely from memory.

At 16 he quit Zimmerman, leaving behind his drawings with the understanding that Zimmerman could use them in his classes but that the money from any sale belonged to Levine. The years passed; Zimmerman died, and it was not until last year that Levine thought of the drawings again. They had fallen into the hands of a Boston dealer who had put them on the market. "These things may or may not have intrinsic value. But they are personal documents and I had to get them off the market," says Levine. It cost him $4,200 to buy up his own child labor.

To Levine, the Archives seemed the appropriate place for the drawings, and the Archives have reason to be grateful for the gift: the drawings make up a rare record of one artist's precocious development. With each month, Levine's draftsmanship grew in strength until, by the end of the series, he was a polished artist. His drawings of workers and wharf scenes catch the somber drama that would preoccupy him throughout the Depression. His age when he did them: 16.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.