Jack Levine

Heritage and social background were critically important to a group of artists active in the first half of the twentieth century. Artists such as Ben Shahn, Raphael and Moses Soyer, and Jack Levine (1915–2010) used their art to comment on the political and social issues of their day. For example, Levine’s upbringing as a blue-collar, first generation Jewish-American between the World Wars gave him a keen interest in the hierarchy of power and status. His study of and decided preference for the Old Master artists Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Velazquez, Goya, and El Greco gave him an artistic style derived from the Baroque, which was almost independent of nineteenth-century academic art and twentieth-century Modernism.

Aware of how social commentary drove his art, late in life Levine reflected on his career: “I made quite a splash in the art world in the 1930s when I was just a kid. And it seems to me that every year since, I have become less and less well known. I made a splash then because of a certain vehemence I had when I looked at society. I was very bitter about injustices, and I expressed a social outlook, which by the 1950s was a very unpopular thing to do. Looking back on the ’70s, it seems to me as if that political motivation—that desire to satirize, to tweak the noses of the powers that be—had died in me. But when I actually look at the work I did then, I realize that I was doing as much painting of that kind as I had ever done.” [1]

Born in Boston, Levine was the youngest of eight children of Lithuanian immigrant parents. His artistic talent set him apart from the others at a young age; his earliest memory was of copying an illustration in The Saturday Evening Post. Thus his self-identity was always as an artist; on the other hand, he was a lifelong Red Sox fan. His wife would describe this dichotomy as “a cab driver reciting Shakespeare.” [2]

Levine credits Harold K. Zimmerman, his teacher for about eight years, for his early start. “I met him when I was about nine years old and we parted company when I was about 16. … I first ran into Zimmerman at the Jewish Welfare Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Zimmerman taught art in several settlement houses around Boston. … Zimmerman was nine years older than I. He was going to the Boston Museum School. He was trying to make a living as an art teacher. He never drew over my drawings. We followed what you could call imaginative drawing, never based on the use of a model. We developed our own art vocabulary from observation and from study of what the great artists of the past had done, using what was needed from everything we saw and remembered. We did not copy—that’s the important point. I never sketched at the circuses or symphonies that I attended as you might think on looking at these drawings. No, in his method of teaching, the idea was to take it in and remember.” [3]

Zimmerman, Levine, and fellow student Hyman Bloom became protégés of Dr. Denman Waldo Ross, a professor who taught art, art history, and design theory at Harvard University. Ross gave Bloom and Levine, still teenagers, art instruction, studio space, and a weekly stipend of twelve dollars. He showed them the Old Master paintings in the collections of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he was a trustee. Ross arranged for Levine to have a drawing exhibition at the Fogg while he was only a high school student. Under Ross, Levine learned paint handling, color theory, and to paint directly from subjects at hand. However, Ross’s patronage ended in 1933 and the young artist struggled for the next few years, living at home, and trying to paint.

In 1935, Levine joined the easel division of the Federal Arts Project, Works Progress Administration, and worked intermittently with the WPA through 1940. In 1936 he had a painting shown at the Museum of Modern Art and was included in an exhibition organized by Edith Halpert at The Downtown Gallery. Halpert became his dealer and gave him his first one-man exhibition in 1939. In 1953, she transferred him—much to the artist’s displeasure—to Charles Alan of the Alan Gallery, who represented him until 1972, when he signed with Kennedy Galleries.

Levine’s 1937 painting, The Feast of Pure Reason brought him widespread critical attention when he was still just twenty-two years old. It was selected for the Carnegie International Exhibition and exhibited at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Levine was featured in Americans, 1942, a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the same year he was drafted into the military. He spent three and a half years in the service, initially painting camouflage but then serving much of his time as a clerk on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. He received his discharge as a Technical Sergeant in 1945. He moved to New York City and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1945 to study in Europe. In 1946, he married fellow artist Ruth Gikow (1915–1982), a figurative artist who had also worked with the WPA. In 1950–1951 he received a Fulbright grant to study in Rome, and through the decade exhibited widely and received positive critical attention. Levine taught from time to time at the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Jack Levine was in his thirties when he was given a 1952 retrospective exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and just forty years old—the youngest artist to date—when he had his exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1955. But by the 1960s, Levine’s career began a slow decline, although he did have a retrospective at the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1964, and at the Jewish Museum of New York, 1978–1979. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1956 and became a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973.

Levine was a severe critic of postwar Modernism in American art. Although he kept painting into the twenty-first century, he never exhibited any inclination to change his style or his opinions even while acknowledging his increasing isolation from the art world mainstream. Ironically, his greatest triumph might have been during the ascendancy of the style he despised the most, Abstract Expressionism. In 1959 Edith Halpert was asked to organize a United States Information Agency juried exhibit, the American National Exhibition, for display in Moscow. Halpert included Levine’s 1946 painting Welcome Home in the exhibition. She was forced to defend her choice in the face of criticism from President Dwight Eisenhower; Levine’s was the only work that the president specifically commented on in the entire selection. News of this dispute was published in Moscow newspapers before the opening of the exhibition. “The Russian art critics—who championed their own socialist realism—saw little of merit. To visitors, however, the most powerful example of American democracy was the fact that Jack Levine’s painting, criticized by none other than President Eisenhower, hung in the show. The director of the United States Information Agency said the Levine served as a symbol of freedom. ‘Whether one admires or rejects Welcome Home as art and whether the artist is politically naïve or worse, his painting has become, by a strange turn of fate, a symbol of freedom in contrast to a closed society.’” [4]

Notes:

[1] Levine quoted in Jack Levine and Stephen B. Frankel, ed. Jack Levine (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 110.

[2] Frederick S. Wight, “Jack Levine,” in Social Realism: Art as a Weapon (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973), 265.

[3] Levine quoted in “Jack Levine Talks about the Donation of 108 of His Drawings to the Archives,” Archives of American Art Journal 30, no. 1, (1990), 2.

[4] Lindsay Pollock, The Girl with The Gallery; Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market (New York: PublicAffairs/Perseus Books Group, 2006), 353.