Great portraits are frequently caricatures. Think of van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, Picasso, Max Beckmann, or Alice Neel. On the other hand, caricature is not portraiture. Well, not often. One exception, in my opinion, is William Auerbach-Levy. Unlike other caricaturists, he did not exaggerate facial features for comic or scurrilous effect. He used distortion to capture the persona in the same subtle way a good portrait painter does. And like a portrait painter, his drawings were done from life, although he frequently reworked sketches afterward in his studio. His caricatures were admired when I went to art school even by the fine arts students who looked down on commercial art. It was his apparently effortless draftsmanship that impressed us. His ability to catch facial idiosyncracies was almost beside the point.

Auerbach-Levy’s style owes much to the unrelenting emphasis placed on life drawing in the early part of this century. He was five when his parents emigrated from Brest-Litovsk in 1894 and settled on the Lower East Side. Six years later, at the age of eleven, he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, and before long he was winning prizes for his etchings. But in spite of his obvious talent, his parents could not conceive that—even in America—a boy could earn a living by making pictures. They persuaded him to attend City College. It was not until after graduation, when he was awarded a two-year fellowship to study art in Paris, that he felt free to follow his own inclinations.

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