Eli Levin

Founder of Tuesday Night Drawing

Eli Levin is an American postwar & contemporary painter. He is considered an iconic artist who came to fame beginning in the late 1960s in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His contemporaries were other, now legendary, artists such as Earl Biss and T. C. Cannon, both of whom came out of the fabled Institute of American Indian Arts. He satirized noted contemporaries in their fame, including a humorist double portrait of T. C. and Biss.

Numerous key galleries and museums, including The Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, have featured Levin's work. Eli Levin has been a realist painter throughout his career, with many of his works focusing on narrative social commentary. While the greater part of Levin’s work is in the medium of egg tempera, he is prolific in oils, watercolors, and intaglio printmaking as well.

As a boy, Levin lived with his parents in a nudist colony near Chicago. During his teenage years and as a young man he studied drawing and painting from nude models. Three of his teachers in New York—Phillip Reisman, George Grosz, and Raphael Soyer—were Social Realists known for their figurative work. He served as the daily monitor of Soyer’s figure-drawing group for two years, and later studied anatomy with Robert Beverley Hale at the Art Student’s League.

By the early 1970s an immense second wave art colony had developed in Santa Fe and it became a cultural boom town. The number of art galleries went from two to a hundred. Besides the Santa Fe Opera, there came into being endless festivals for art, music, literature, theater, movies, fashion, and the crafts of Native Americans and Spanish Americans. The city's complex heritage of three interlocked cultures became “Santa Fe Style.” But the fifteen years between 1964 and 1980 held a special magic and Eli Levin experienced it all: the fading generation of older artists and the newly arriving younger generation; wild night life at Claude's Bar; artists’ battles with conservative arts organizations; questionable successes and tragic failures of careers; exemplary examples of lifetime dedication; and a number of suppressed scandals.

Eli’s memoir, Santa Fe Bohemia, is packed with anecdotes about the various artists with whom he painted, plotted, and partied, and testifies to the exciting rebirth and burgeoning growth of one of this country's best known art colonies.

Eli, the son of novelist Meyer Levin, is known for his paintings of Santa Fe night life. He has run art galleries, written art reviews, and taught art history. He established two of Santa Fe’s longest running artist's gatherings: the Tuesday Night Drawing Group in 1969 and the Santa Fe Etching Club in 1980. He holds Masters degrees from Wisconsin University and St. John's College.