The cover of David Levinthal’s latest book, Baseball, depicts the artist’s favorite player, Joe DiMaggio, following through on his classic swing. With its evocative colors and shading, it appears to be a compelling painting.

“That was some of the effect I was going for, that almost Edward Hopper/Norman Rockwell feeling,” Levinthal told NJ Jewish News in a telephone interview from his Manhattan studio.

In fact, that image of DiMaggio — like the book’s other pictures — is not a painting; it’s a big photograph of a small statue.

At the age of 57, when most people have long since put away childish pursuits, Levinthal still uses toys as the basis of his artwork by photographing models and figurines.

According to Levinthal, the makers of the statuettes he uses as his photographic subjects “are choosing to capture a very iconic moment. That famous swing of DiMaggio’s encapsulates him as a player, so I was able [to] capture that kind of atmosphere.”

His works sometimes have controversial results. The first book in which he applied his trademark style — Hitler Moves East — was a 1972 collaborative project with Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip Doonesbury and a fellow graduate student at Yale University’s Department of Design.

“Garry was working on a…thesis on German graphics of the 1930s and ’40s. When his publisher asked if we’d be interested in working on a book project together, we both immediately said yes, having absolutely no idea of what we were going to do,” he said.

That project, said Levinthal, “focused my attention on the ideas of working with toys and formulating the style that I’ve use for 30-something years.”

Levinthal has his art down to a science; almost all the pictures he took for the “Baseball” exhibit appear in his new book. “I’m at the point where I can previsualize what I’m looking for,” he said. “Unlike many of my other series, where I might shoot three or four different angles with the same figurine, I really tried to focus on one angle. Otherwise I would just be taking so many photographs.”

Levinthal’s camera — a large-scale Polaroid — is about the size of a refrigerator and produces 20- by 24-inch images.

He started collecting the miniatures — most of them are about eight-inches tall — in the late 1990s. Older models, depicting Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and others, were produced by the Hartland Company, while more recent pieces, including such current stars as Derek Jeter, were made by the Danbury Mint. While some figures are remarkably detailed, others are less recognizable even to the astute fan, so Levinthal compensated by shooting them from angles that made it possible for viewers to identify the player while hiding any “shortcomings.”

“Even though some of the players are contemporary, the book and photos capture that almost inherent nostalgia that baseball brings out,” said Levinthal.

While Baseball might be as American as apple pie, a good deal of his earlier work was more thought-provoking. Some of his other collections depict “noir-ish” cityscapes (“Modern Romance”), religion (“Jesus”), race (“Blackface”), and what can only be described within these pages as “mature” content (“XXX”).

Levinthal revisited World War II with his “Mein Kampf” exhibit. More than anything else he created, “that’s the project that I was most acutely sensitive about.” He wanted to be sure, he said, that he was in no way “denigrating or demeaning the experience of the Holocaust by using toy figures. I would say of all my bodies of work, I was most pleased with the way that turned out.” “Mein Kampf” made its debut at the Holocaust Museum in Houston in 1997.

Levinthal’s current exhibit, “Baseball and Barbies,” is on display at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center at Montclair State University until April 2007, after which it will move to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He is excited about the prospect of meeting Berra at the official exhibit opening at the museum in January.

“Yogi is one of those people who captures everything that’s good about baseball, the shared experience that people have as fans,” Levinthal said. “Baseball” includes several shots of a Jackie Robinson figure sliding into home plate with Berra as catcher, a scene taken from a play in the 1955 World Series, where Robinson was called safe on a steal of home, much to the Yankees star’s demonstrative objections.

Levinthal, the oldest of four siblings, grew up in northern California, the son of expatriate New Yorkers. “I used to tell people I was the product of a mixed marriage,” he said. “My mother was from Central Park West and my father was from Flatbush. You can tell if someone was a New Yorker because they would immediately know what you were talking about.”

Levinthal attended Stanford University in the 1960s with the idea of becoming a constitutional lawyer, but after a “very large extremely boring poli-sci” class as a freshman, he knew that wasn’t his future.

When not working on his personal projects, Levinthal occasionally does commercial photography. “It’s like working with a different set of muscles.” His current project is a children’s book, “the by-product of being a father,” he said (Levinthal and his wife, Kate, are the parents of two-and-a-half year old Sam). “It’s kind of ‘CSI- meets-fairy tales.’ They’ve also asked me to write the text, which has been an interesting challenge and a lot of fun.”