Artist:  BORIS LEVEN (American film and theatre art director & production designer, 1908 - 1986)

Medium:  Original Art Director's Sketch [in gouache on illustration board] from films and other productions worked on by Leven, including theater music and dance programs or a production design sketch for a motion picture

Signature:  Hand Signed by the Artist, as shown

Provenance:  Hatay Stratton Fine Art, Northampton, Massachusetts

About the Artist:   Boris Leven was a Russian-born Academy Award-winning art director and production designer whose Hollywood career spanned fifty-three years.  Born in Moscow in the family of Israel Levin and Zinaida Narkirier, Leven emigrated to the United States in 1927 and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from the University of Southern California, he attended the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York City.  The designs Leven created ranged from realistic to highly stylized. For Giant (1956), he constructed the Victorian home that sits isolated in a wide expanse of open field, which became an iconic image for the film. His work for West Side Story (1961), which won him the Academy Award for Best Color Art Direction, included actual New York City locations combined with a tenement rooftop and fire escape, inspired by the more abstract stage production, that were built on a soundstage. For New York, New York (1977), he created a fantasized version of Manhattan set in the 1940s.  He was the art director for The Flying Deuces (1939), Hello Frisco, Hello (1943), Invaders from Mars (1953), The Silver Chalice (1954), and Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973), among others. His credits as production designer include Donovan's Brain (1953), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Two for the Seesaw (1962), The Sand Pebbles (1966), The Sound of Music (1965), Star! (1968), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Mandingo (1975), The Last Waltz (1978), The King of Comedy (1982), Fletch (1985) and The Color of Money (1986).