"[2] Marion Lerner-Levine was born in Hackney, London, England on October 31, 1931,[3] as the daughter of a Polish mother and a Romanian father, LSE economist Abba Lerner.
In 1950, she furthered her education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Paul Weighardt, Laura Van Pappelendam, Max Kahn, and Vera Berdich.
[4] Although Lerner-Levine painted houses and yards while living in California, she turned to still life in 1968, when she and her and her family moved to Staten Island.
[7] Her oil paintings usually represent arrangements of brightly colored objects, offset by strong areas of white, that are clustered in a manner reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi.
[4] Del Gaizo (1975),[8] for example, features ordinary household items—canned goods—arrayed in a seemingly chaotic pattern, similar to what one might find in any kitchen, which Carolee Thea described as "amusing" and "outside the realm of any pop-art stigma.