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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Staring at the salvaged antiques that she had been collecting over time, Diana Levitt made a fateful decision that would change her world forever. She had spent the previous three years living on a sailboat in Hawaii, making paintings, ceramics, and hand-made paper pieces. Returning home to Los Angeles, she resurrected her career in Hollywood public relations and script writing. She had gone full circle, back to the world she had sailed away from. Now she stood in front of her memories in the form of photos, memorabilia, and the antique bric-a-brac she could not bear to part with. Something in her would not let go of the creative impulse to make abstract connections of contrasts and harmonies. Perhaps she didn't realize that by arranging she was composing. She was transforming the neglected little treasures of the past into visual poetry.
Diana was making assemblage art: "ah-sem-blah-je" as it is pronounced by the French. It might have been called Dada back in the '20's and surrealism in the 1930's. Marcel Duchamp referred to his found objects as "readymades." To Diana Levitt these were her oddments and not really her art. It wasn't until she began to study with the noted assemblagist George Herms as her mentor in 1989 that she began to see these arrangements as sculptures and her obsessive pastime now became serious art making.
Diana had always see herself as a painter. She had attended the prestigious Art Students' League in New York and trained under the tutelage of the great American realist Reginald Marsh. Ingrained in her was the need to depict the life and vitality of a certain Americana that she was a part of. Her father was a Broadway playwright and she followed him into the world of theatre as an actress, paying her dues in a variety of stage roles over the years. Along the way she maintained her passion for painting and passed it on to her daughter Jennifer Markes, who has enjoyed a highly successful career as a painter and graphic artist herself. Mother and daughter have studied together and collaborated on works of art.
Strangely enough it was her career as a public relations director for an antiques dealer that was to eventually lead Diana back into her art. As she observed the flow of treasures and rusty junk of antique Americana, she began to acquire and display her "oddments" -- castoff rusty junk, yellowed clock faces, buttons and faded sepia prints - which became the grist for her mill. Often using antique wooden drawers as frames, she embraced the passage of time in the rust and decay, creating new and meaningful juxtapositions within.
The pictures and objects set in her box formats reinvent themselves through new narrative connections and formal functions. Like the great American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, Diana has categorized her memories and treasures and has recycled them in a variety of new, meaningful, but abstract arrangements.
The transformed collectibles of Diana Levitt's art, like the constructions and collages of Kurt Schwitters, have in their mute deconstructions a sense of the absurd and the futile, while giving us a view of the past as precious and fleeting. She seems to tell us that if we just look closely we will find beauty and meaning in a world of that which is left behind in the rush to what is new.
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