Dani Levinas, an Argentine-born businessman and art collector who amassed a trove of works by contemporary artists, especially from Latin America, and helped shape the cultural life of Washington as board chairman of the Phillips Collection, died April 22 at his home in Miami. He was 75.
His brother Salo Levinas confirmed his death and said he did not know the cause.
Mr. Levinas was the son of Jews who fled antisemitic persecution in Eastern Europe and began a new and prosperous life in Argentina, where his father ran a clothing company and his mother was a fashion designer.
Mr. Levinas, too, became an immigrant when the military dictatorship led by Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla rose to power in Argentina in 1976. Mr. Levinas was not targeted in the junta’s “dirty war” of repression, political killings and forced disappearances, but he knew people who were killed and did not wish, he later said, to live in a “lawless state.”
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In 1981, with his wife and young family, Mr. Levinas came to the United States, where he settled in Washington. He was the publisher of a newsletter started by John Naisbitt, a business analyst who wrote the best-selling 1982 book “Megatrends,” and later co-founded Georgetown Publishing House, which printed newsletters for business executives.
Mr. Levinas also started a company that sold prepaid debit cards, owned franchises of the Esprit fashion brand and invested in real estate.
Raised from a young age to appreciate art, Mr. Levinas used his wealth to build a sprawling collection of contemporary work, a portion of which he and his wife, Mirella, displayed at their longtime residence in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. They had remade the mansion — formerly home to Evalyn Walsh McLean, who had once owned the Hope Diamond — as a live-in gallery.
Mr. Levinas collected the works of established artists such as León Ferrari and Liliana Porter of Argentina, Vik Muniz and Cildo Meireles of Brazil, Gabriel de la Mora of Mexico, and Iván Navarro of Chile. But he took particular joy in discovering new creators, especially those pushing the bounds of what art could be.
In 2016, Mr. Levinas became board chairman at the Phillips Collection, a museum near Dupont Circle that was founded in 1921 and was one of the earliest museums of modern art in the United States. He held the position through the museum’s centennial until 2022.
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In a statement after Mr. Levinas’s death, the Phillips Collection credited him with “encouraging the museum to be more innovative, experimental, and global in scope,” and with having introduced the works of Spanish artists including Bernardí Roig and Daniel Canogar, as well as Latin American artists such as the Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros, into its permanent holdings.
Mr. Levinas had “a passion for contemporary art, and he brought that focus with a single-minded determination to the Phillips and really pushed us and challenged us to move more quickly — more aggressively — in that direction,” said Dorothy Kosinski, who served during his tenure as director of the Phillips.
She credited Mr. Levinas with leading the museum to present the exhibit “The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement,” which opened in 2019.
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The show, one of the most ambitious exhibits ever mounted at the Phillips, featured paintings, sculptures, photography, videography and installations by 75 international artists exploring historical and modern-day refugee crises and migration.
In the work “Liberty N.Y.,” New York-based artist Zoe Leonard assembled three suitcases and a typewriter case to create a commentary on the liminal state in which refugees often find themselves.
“Wonderland,” a video by Turkish visual artist Erkan Özgen, showed a 13-year-old Syrian refugee who is deaf and mute acting out his survival amid an attack by the Islamic State.
“La Mer Morte (The Dead Sea),” an installation by Algerian-French artist Kader Attia, consisted of clothing that washed up on a Mediterranean beach. Left unsaid, but impossible to overlook, is that the migrants who had worn those sweaters and socks and shoes may or may not have made it ashore alive.
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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority at first rejected an advertising campaign that would have publicized the show on buses and in Metro stations, citing prohibitions on advertisements “intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions” and those “intended to influence public policy.”
Share this articleShareThe transit agency later reversed the decision on the art exhibition, which Mr. Levinas insisted was “not a political show” and drew “no conclusions about who is to blame or what is to be done about the record number of men, women and children who now live far from home.”
Writing in The Washington Post, he explained the exhibit’s resonance in his life.
“I am an immigrant,” he wrote. “ … My family shared something fundamental to all displaced peoples: We did not want to leave. Fleeing your home, your culture, your friends and wider family, your language and all that is familiar is not done lightly, nor with joy. As this exhibition reminds us, the refugee story often ends in tragedy.”
Daniel Aaron Levinas was born in Buenos Aires on Aug. 25, 1948. His father immigrated to Argentina from Lithuania in 1928, and his mother arrived from Poland in 1939.
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He credited his mother with instilling in him his interest in art, which led him to collect posters before he began building his collection of paintings, sculptures and other works.
Mr. Levinas studied law at the University of Argentine Social Museum in Buenos Aires and experienced the fear that prevailed after the military dictatorship came to power.
“I remember in university the police coming onto campus on horses and beating people,” he told The Post. “ … They were absolutely sure if you studied philosophy, psychiatry or literature, you were a communist. I did not feel threatened personally, but I had books by philosophers of anarchy. I remember burning the books because I was afraid if somebody came to my house and looked at the books, they would say I was with the guerrillas.”
Mr. Levinas did not practice law after graduation, working instead for his family’s business before settling in the United States.
In addition to his work with the Phillips Collection, he served on the board of the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum.
A decade ago, Mr. Levinas led an effort to transform the Franklin School, a once majestic but by then decaying building located on 13th Street NW in downtown Washington, into an exhibition space that was to be called the Institute for Contemporary Expression.
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The plan was approved in 2014 under Mayor Vincent C. Gray but was canceled the following year under his successor, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser. The building ultimately became Planet Word, a language museum that opened in 2020.
Mr. Levinas’s wife, the former Mirella Budnik, died in 2022 after 51 years of marriage. Survivors include three children, Mariana Huberman of Washington, Diego Levinas of Miami and Pablo Levinas of Hoedspruit, South Africa; two brothers; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Levinas sold his Georgetown home after his wife’s death. In addition to his residence in Miami, he had a home in Madrid, where he wrote about art for the Spanish newspaper El País. He compiled his interviews with international collectors in a book published in English last year as “The Guardians of Art.”
For his part, Mr. Levinas once remarked that he did not realize that he was a collector until someone asked to see his collection. He bought art, he said, because he took pleasure in supporting artists and in living amid the beauty they had created.
“It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be beautiful to you,” he told the New York Times, “but it touches me and it talks to me.”
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