Lot 66039: EDGAR LEVY (American, 1907-1975) Lucille at the

EDGAR LEVY (American, 1907-1975) Lucille at the Drafting Board, circa 1933 Oil on canvas 36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 cm) PROVENANCE: Estate of the artist, 1975; Joel Levy (the artist's son), 1975-1990; Babcock Galleries, New York, 1990; Private collection, 1990-2009. Edgar Levy is remembered as an artist of firm convictions, as well as a lively and articulate thinker. As a young art student he secured an attendant's job at the Harlem Hospital autopsy room in order to study anatomy. Later in life he studied advanced mathematics at Columbia and attended international scientific conferences in Europe. Levy's interest in art led him to study at the Art Students League under modernist Jan Matulka. There, he formed lifelong associations and friendships with George McNeil, Dorothy Dehner, Irene Rice Pereira, David Smith, Mark Rothko, Adolf Gottlieb and his future wife, Lucille Corcos. John Graham, himself lionized for the advancement of Abstract Expressionism, wrote in his book System and Dialectics of Art that Levy was one of "the young outstanding American painters" of the period. Levy was among those American artists who articulated the basis for what would become Abstract Expressionism. His work embraced Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism while asserting an original - sometimes rugged and sometimes witty - approach to the struggle between abstraction and non-objective painting.