Levine Aaron M. 1934-2023

Aaron Levine, a retired trial lawyer, who with his wife, Barbara, amassed one of the most significant private holdings of work by Marcel Duchamp, died on Tuesday morning at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. He was 88. Aaron M. Levine was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. His father ran an optometry shop in Bushwick; Barbara’s father ran a pharmacy down the street. They met as teenagers after Aaron’s family moved onto the same floor of the apartment building where Barbara’s family lived.

He attended law school at George Washington University. A week after she graduated from Skidmore College in Upstate New York, Barbara moved to D.C. and the two married. In 1971, he founded his eponymous law firm, which focused on various forms of consumer rights lawsuits as they related to dangerous drugs, defective devices, and medical malpractice.

Aaron Levine died Tuesday at 88. It’s a great loss for American art. Levine and his wife, Barbara, 85, who survives him, were maverick collectors and among the capital’s most important philanthropists. In 2018, the couple promised more than 50 works, including 35 by Duchamp, to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, an act characterized by the museum’s director, Melissa Chiu, as “the most important donation by individuals since our founding gift by Mr. Hirshhorn in 1974.” Aaron Levine was born in Brooklyn and grew up in the same apartment building as his future wife. They started dating in high school, and married soon after Barbara graduated from Skidmore College. “Beyond his art collecting, which was so smart and so thoughtful, he was a really complete person with an incredible marriage,” Sallick said. “He and Barbara shared collecting in every sense, even if they didn’t always agree on everything.”

Levine attended law school in Washington, where the couple later made their home. As a lawyer, he won major settlements representing victims of defective drugs and medical devices. When they became interested in buying art, Aaron was initially attracted to German expressionism, while Barbara was inclined toward minimalism. For a while, they collected works by local artists, such as photographer William Christenberry and abstract painter Sam Gilliam. But they gradually switched to conceptual art, by Duchamp and by an array of like-minded international artists working with ideas, humor and (often) found objects, or “readymades.”