U.S. News & World Report

February 3, 1997

Dark stirrings in toyland

David Levinthal’s disturbing art turns the familiar strange

By Miriam Horn

It seems an innocent premise for an exhibition: photos of toys in tableaux reminiscent of Hollywood Westerns or scenes from Life magazine. Plastic soldiers struggle in waist-deep snows. Cowboys swing into saloons. Curvy women with cherry lips and yellow hair flirt like Marilyn Monroe. The artist, too, seems innocuous. Pale, and soft spoken, David Levinthal lives among thousands of toys, painting and arranging them with obsessive care to create images that, for a moment, appear real.

Levinthal’s pictures, on display at the International Center of Photography in New York, are as nostalgic and alluring as our national myths and childhood dreams. But they also are deeply discomforting, so much so that the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia—which exhibited the controversial photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe—last May canceled a show of his most recent work. Levinthal’s earlier series on the Wild West and postwar sexual innocence revealed the artifice of cherished American myths. His latest pictures go further, revisiting with toys the Holocaust, sexual violence, and—the work the ICA refused—the Little Black Sambos, lawn jockeys, and mammy colored cookie jars that once ornamented yards and kitchens across America. This last work hit the rawest cultural nerve. Some critics questioned the motives of a white artist taking gorgeous close-ups of racist artifacts. Others wondered if such images were a needed reminder of cruel historical truth or a new act of degradation.

Levinthal, 47, created his first toy story in 1972 as a Yale graduate student, working with classmate and Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau. While America’s first televised war played nightly from Vietnam, the two created a fake photo documentary of the Germans’ 1941 invasion of Russia. Like a boy absorbed in play (and often working in his childhood bedroom), Levinthal buried 3-inch soldiers in drifts of flour, torched model bombers, and photographed them as they went down. He would go to any lengths, Trudeau says, "including setting fire to … his living room rug." When a professor asked, "Why don’t you take pictures of reality?" Levinthal answered, "These toys are my reality."

It was more than a confession of eccentricity. Levinthal lived the war vicariously through toys, movies, and TV. That vicarious past was central to his experience and became the enduring subject of his work. As University of Massachusetts Judaic studies professor James Young would later say of Levinthal’s Nazi series: He can’t remember the Holocaust but only the images he’s seen. "He takes pictures of his Holocaust experiences."

Levinthal’s 1977 book of photos, Hitler Moves East, achieved a cult status among young artists: Ever since, staged and fabricated images have dominated art photography. From doomed soldiers, Levinthal moved to desperate women, this time setting his playthings in dimly lit diners and dingy apartments. Wandering with a video camera amid an urban toyland of his own making, he shot these photos from a TV screen, paradoxically making them even more plausible: the black and blue pixilated images look like surveillance videos on reality TV.

In the 1980s, while Ronald Reagan idealized America’s past, Levinthal also looked to the good old days. He created a "West that never was but will always be," a place remembered from Gunsmoke and Saturday matinees, then moved on to the 1950s, arranging pinup girls in coy poses on the beach. But even in such nostalgic images, darkness creeps in. The fakery is patent, plastic seams visible on the cowboy’s arms. The pretty young women sunbathe under a black sky, unaware that a camera sneaks up from behind. In the "Desire" series, the danger deepens: Naked women are tied up, blindfolded, misused.

From The Nutcracker to photographer Cindy Sherman’s mutilated dolls, artists have used toys to arouse reverie, pity, horror. Toys are abbreviations, archetypes: All men are square jawed, all women voluptuous. But toys also are helpless, and infinitely compliant. Levinthal makes the objectification of women literal, provoking a response both voyeuristic and guilty. It is disturbing to be stirred by images of sexual sadism, still more to realize that what stirs us is a 6-inch toy.

Levinthal’s fascination with Nazis began with his discovery in Austria of an Adolf Hitler toy. He soon found a source close to home, a New Jersey hobby shop selling SS officers and Führers, lovingly hand painted down to their jackboots and death’s head insignia. Levinthal gave his Nazis thrilling pageants, replicating the seductive force of the real thing. For the killing camps, he showed his unusual inventiveness: a toy fort made a perfect guard tower, Christmas ribbon gleamed as barbed wire, a doll-house washer and dryer became nice, round ovens.

Blackface redux. Levinthal’s newest interest coincides with a growing zeal for "blackface memorabilia" among scholars and collectors, especially black collectors, including Oprah Windfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates collects, he says, the way "Jews remember the horrific details of the holocaust, as a weapon against its recurrence." Columbia Prof. Robert O’Meally owns a "Jolly Nigger Bank"—a metal minstrel that swallows a coin, eyes rolling back in its head. O’Meally’s wife refused to have it in the house. "She thought it a contamination and feared our children would misunderstand."

O’Meally teaches Ralph Ellison’s writings and wanted the bank because the Invisible Man had one in his briefcase, broken but impossible to throw away. "The character comes to realize that people don’t see him but the doll, a reduced figure, nothing but a greedy smile," he says. "I show it to my class to consider to what degree the African-American identity includes this grotesque figure. Part of our equipment for survival is an awareness of how we’re misperceived."

Though the marketplace calls such objects black memorabilia, Patricia Turner, author of Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies, notes that "these are not black folk objects but products of the white imagination." Depicting blacks as dumbly service, and erasing their sexuality and anger, they make happy buffoons of people who otherwise would arouse white guilt and fear.

Because Levinthal is white, Turner who is black, suspects that some people will see in his work the exploitation of African American pain. This saddens Levinthal. "I grew up with this stuff, too. But only black artists can comment on race and only women on sexuality. That’s not a dialogue but a diatribe." He wonders if the ICA would have suddenly canceled his show after a year of planning if he were black. ICA curator Judith Tannenbaum says race wasn’t the issue: "The work wasn’t as strong as his earlier work. It wasn’t clear what the artist’s contribution was."

The misunderstandings arise from Levinthal’s intentional mining of the blackface objects’ seductive beauty. O’Meally says he finds the photos "irresistible," then feels horror at being enthralled—precisely the response he believes the artist intends. "He’s not popping a quarter into the mouth of the monster but capturing its monstrousness." Levinthal discovers in these objects what they were meant to deny—and inner life, a capacity for confrontation. "They’re beautiful," says O’Meally, "but they might kill you."