He studied art at the Art Center School in Los Angeles and at Académie Julian in Paris from 1949 to 1951.
John Harrison Levee received a master"s degree in philosophy from University of California, Los Angeles and became an aviator in the Second World War. After the war he decided to stay to work as a painter in Montparnasse. His early painting was inspired by the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, which included Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, among others
After a period of hard-edge painting based on geometric abstraction in the 1960s, Levee returned to his more spontaneous Abstract Expressionism style, often using collage elements with loose brush work typical of lyrical abstraction.