Chris Beetles Gallery

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George Orwell

David Levine (1926-2009)

Price

£3,500

Signed

Signed and dated 69
Inscribed 'Orwell' on reverse

Medium

Pen and ink

Dimensions

14 ½ x 9 inches

Illustrated

The New York Review of Books, 30 January 1969, 'The Writing on the Wall' by Mary McCarthy (a review of The Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism of George Orwell);
John Updike (intro), Pens and Needles. Literary Caricatures by David Levine, Boston: Gambit, 1969, Page 145;
The New York Review of Books, 6 November 2003, 'Good Man, Bad World' by John Banville (a review of two books on George Orwell)

Exhibited

'The Americans Are Coming', Chris Beetles Gallery, 5-30 May 2015;
'The Illustrators. The British Art of Illustration 1894-2020', Chris Beetles Gallery, November 2020-January 2021, No 192

George Orwell

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), the writer of some of the most concise and cogent English prose of the twentieth century, which sought to oppose all forms of totalitarianism and champion democratic socialism. In his first full-length work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1936), he provided an exposé of poverty based on personal experience of ill-paid jobs. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), published after three novels, extended his investigation into the bleak living conditions of the working classes by surveying the industrial north. Homage to Catalonia (1938), provided an account his involvement with the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War, which consolidated his political stance. Though he quickly produced another novel – Coming Up for Air (1939) – he would have to wait until the end of the Second World War to publish his two acknowledged masterpieces. Animal Farm (1945) is an allegorical novella that satirises the events of Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Russia, while 1984 (1949) is a dystopian novel that focusses on one man’s hopeless struggle against a totalitarian regime. The present drawing accompanied a review of the collected edition of his many essential shorter works: essays, letters and pieces of journalism.