Menahem Lewin
Menahem was an American artist born in Rishon LeZion, then Palestine (now Israel). At the age of five, his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Erasmus Hall High School before enrolling at Cooper Union School of Art. Following his service in World War II, Lewin continued his studies at the Ozenfant School of Art under French modernist Amédée Ozenfant and later at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, where he studied with renowned painter Rufino Tamayo. He went on to teach art at New York Technical College, part of the CUNY system. While attending Cooper Union, he met fellow artist Shirley Levine, whom he later married. Together they raised two sons.
As a young artist, Lewin wrote his own credo:
"The artist works in the privacy of conscience, in the prison of his loneliness, in the hell of his fears and desire, in the humility of his uncertainties, within the conflict between the condition of his society and the intangibles of primeval forces, in the bitterness of his frustration and the suffering of his ignorance... He is not an optimist but knows his creative moments are the few times that he, as Everyman, can truly consider himself free."
Lewin's work has been compared to the social realism of the 1930s and the German Expressionism of the 1920s, yet he refused to be confined to any single movement or style. Whether working in representation, abstraction, surrealism, or impressionism, he chose whatever artistic language best expressed his vision. He rejected commercial trends, believing instead that an artist's responsibility was to communicate something meaningful about the human experience.
One of his teachers, Sidney Delevante, observed, "Some may find a Lewin painting difficult to live with, some less difficult to live with one or two or more, but there will be a few who may find it much more difficult to live without even one."
Working first from his attic studio in Brooklyn and later from his home in the Catskills, Lewin created more than 800 paintings, along with drawings and poetry. Many of his monumental canvases remain in storage in Newburgh, New York. Throughout his lifetime, he exhibited his work in New York City and the Catskills.
Nothing could prevent Lewin from creating. Even after suffering a stroke that caused cognitive decline and diminishing eyesight, he continued to draw, tucking sketches into the seat of his walker. For Lewin, making art was never a choice. It was a lifelong calling and his way of exploring and communicating the human condition. His remarkable body of work stands as a testament to a lifetime of unwavering artistic conviction and deserves to be seen.
