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| Jack Levine "Adam and Eve: Expulsion" 1981 |
Recently the artist Jack Levine passed away at the age of 90. I vaguely remembered the work of Levine and the online retrospective that accompanied his obituary was a good reminder of his painterly talents.
Levine, whose parents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, grew up in Boston and attended Harvard where he studied under Denman Ross. He was associated with the Boston Expressionists, which included his fellow classmate Hyman Bloom and Karl Zerbe. Levine’s early work is strongly influenced by Oscar Kokaschka and Chaim Soutine and reveals a strong wit and a talent for social commentary. His early work is expressive and evocative rather than accurately descriptive.
After graduation he was employed for five years by the Works Progress Administration. He participated in exhibitions at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum as well as New York’s Museum of Modern Art before serving 3 years in the Army during World War Two. In 1951, Levine toured Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship and became enamored with El Greco’s mannerist distortions.
It is interesting that in Levine’s case studying mannerist distortions actually meant that he learned restraint. Always a deft painter, after viewing El Greco his contours became clear and he learned to control his raw expressive power. He moved away from boundless shape and color to depicting forms that were contained within line.
Never at home with only pure expression, Levine populated his pictures with people. However, his interests weren’t those of an academic or realist artist as his instinct towards the human form was always that of a caricaturists. Though Levine surely bumped shoulders with the American Regionalist and the Abstract Expressionists, he belonged to the movement known as Social Realism.
Social Realists were concerned with depicting the daily life of the Amercian working class in an un-romanticized manner. Many of the artists had socialist leanings and were influenced by the French Realists Millet and Courbet (whose own artistic ideas were strongly influenced by the French Socialist thinker Prudhon) . It is interesting to note that Social Realism in some ways resembles that of the contemporaneous movement known as Socialist Realism, the official art of the Soviet Union. However, unlike the Socialist Realism of the U.S.S.R., the Social Realist in the U.S. were free to depict whatever they desired.
Many Social Realists were interested in eschewing prettifying effects in order to create works that empathized with the downtrodden worker. As a movement it shared a common sentiment with the New York Ashcan school, which flourished in the early 1900s prior to the interest in the School of Paris brought to the US by the Armory Show. Similarly, the Social Realists fell out of favor during the rise of Abstract Expressionism, a movement influenced by the imported European Expressionism that came about between the two world wars.
Since the 1960s, Social Realism has fallen out of the spotlight. Levine’s last retrospective was in 1978 at New York’s Jewish Museum so it is no wonder that I had a hard time recalling Levine’s work. Moreover, since the death of his wife in the early 1980s, Levine became increasingly interested Hebraism and quietly produced many masterful paintings based on the Old Testament. In this way Levine has become a New Old Master following in the footsteps of Rembrandt (who interestingly had influenced Levine’s adolescent painting idol Soutine).
Too long out of the public eye, Levine is about due for some public admiration just as the world is about due for some good painting from the Old Testament.
Rest in Peace, Jack Levine (1915-2010).