Biography

David Levinthal’s photographs draw attention to the concealed meanings of the seemingly benign dolls and toys that comprised the texture of his childhood memories. As an adult he returned to the objects that had occupied his youth and reexamined them with a heightened sensitivity to the role that they play in shaping our adult attitudes. Levinthal discovered that these playthings convey societal values, that they are tools created by adults as a means of shaping behavior and encouraging the assimilation of mainstream, socially acceptable principles. The power of Levinthal’s work is based on his ability to evoke vivid childhood fantasies while simultaneously questioning the morality and ambiguity of cultural constructs, ranging from Barbie dolls to toy soldiers.

Levinthal grew up in Atherton, California, and attended Stanford University, majoring in studio art. For graduate school he decided to enroll in a new dedicated photography program that was part of the graphic design program at the Yale School of Art. He became friends with classmate Garry Trudeau whose Doonesbury cartoon had recently gone into national syndication. After they both graduated in 1973, Trudeau’s publishers suggested that the two friends work on a book together. At the time, Trudeau was working on a project involving German graphics of the 1930s and 1940s, and Levinthal had renewed a childhood interest in toys, purchasing toy soldiers, arranging them in imaginary military formations and battle scenes and photographing them. The resulting book, Hitler Moves East, was released in 1977, after Levinthal had taught for several years at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In 1979, he decided to enroll in business school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying management science, a move he describes as, “perhaps the smartest and most useful thing that I did.” He moved to Manhattan and began pursuing his photography full-time in 1983.

The dynamic image Untitled, from The Wild West series, was created using a combination of techniques. He began by taking a small SX-70 Polaroid of a toy cowboy holding a shotgun and riding a horse against a backdrop resembling a rocky terrain, using an extremely shallow depth of field. He then created a transparency scaled to a ratio of one inch to two feet, and, working with a Southern California company that specialized in industrial billboards and outdoor murals, he fabricated a small vinyl mural. The expanded scale makes for a grainy image, disguising the clues that the subject is a toy and perpetuating the illusion that this might be a real cowboy riding a horse across a plain. Levinthal comments on the nature of mass media and the mythology surrounding cowboys and the Wild West of yesteryear by picturing a faux-realistic scene with implied motion and drama.

Cowboys became an essential aspect of American self-mythologizing as population density and opportunity drove Americans to the relatively unsettled plains and even further west, where the myth of the self-sufficient lonesome cowboy was born. This myth was perpetuated through the media, and Western films became a genre unto themselves, wherein battles of good against evil were enacted in frontier towns. The image of the cowboy as an American legend is still cultivated by media-savvy politicians, who know that by donning a ten-gallon hat they tap into American voters’ dreams of unfettered independence, wide open space, and freedom from societal mores and limitations. Levinthal’s sophisticated photo-based image playfully proclaims his familiarity with the romanticized Wild West and the depth of this far-reaching mythology’s impact on the American psyche.

Through his photographs of iconic American toys, Levinthal represents cultural symbols as ambiguous reality deconstructed and reexamined. Viewers superimpose their own viewpoints on the imagery, constructing a narrative that reflects their own values and political views. Levinthal is both a critic and a consumer of the mass media, and his artwork provokes viewers to assess the artificiality that he presents and determine the extent to which this imagery has infiltrated their own belief systems. —J.N.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

David Levinthal was born in San Francisco in 1949.  He received his degrees from Stanford University (A.B., Studio Art, 1970), Yale University (M.F.A., Photography, 1973), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.M., Management Science, 1981).  He was awarded a two-year Polaroid Corporation Artist Support in 1987, a Visual Artists Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1995.  In 1997 he received the Prix du Livre de Photographie, Le Prix du Livre-Images, les Recontres, Arles, France.  Levinthal has exhibited nationally and internationally and his work is included in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth, TX; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; International Center of Photography, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of the Arts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; New York Public Library; San Jose Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  Levinthal currently lives and works in New York. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2011)

David Levinthal lives and works in New York City, NY.

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