Levon West/Ivan Dmitri (1900-1968) American, Framed Etching. Titled "Changing Flies." Signature bottom right. Depicts a fly fisher in waders in the water. 

Frame: 20 5/8 x 15 3/4 in.

Sight: 13 3/4 x 8 7/8 in.

#2563 . 

Levon West was born in Centerville, South Dakota in February, 1900 with the last name Assadoorian. His father was a Congregational Minister of Armenian descent, and the entire family changed their last name to West when the draft came up for World War I to keep their heritage a secret in case Levon and his brother were captured during combat. After leaving the Navy in 1919 he attended the University of Minnesota, studying business and auditing a few art classes on the side. After graduating he moved to New York City in 1924 in preparation to attend Harvard Business School, but wound up enrolling in the Art Students’ League to focus on etching. In 1927 he submitted an etching of Charles Lindbergh’s Transatlantic flight to the New York Times that ignited his career and made him one of the preeminent etchers in the country. After the Great Depression, shifting art tastes towards Modernism diminished the appeal of Levon’s representational style, and he abandoned etching for color photography, changing his name to Ivan Dmitri to avoid being connected with his earlier work. He published “Color in Photography,” which became one of the most popular instructional manuals on the subject into the 1940s. Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ivan talked the Saturday Evening Post into making him one of their war correspondents, taking thousands of pictures for the Army Air Corps. After World War II Ivan continued in commercial photography, contributing to Life Magazine and major clients like General Electric and Trans World Airways, and developed the traveling Photography in Fine Arts exhibits from 1959 until 1967 to promote photography as a legitimate art form. Ivan died on April 25, 1968, and it was not until his voluminous files from his career were donated to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian that his connection to Levon West was discovered.