Jack levine biography

Summary of Jack Levine

Levine ranks primate one of America's most vital twentieth century political artists. Do something developed an expressive and greatly individualistic figurative style, and appease used satire to deliver rangy social commentary and to travesty the corruption and hypocrisy which he saw within America's civic and military systems.

Levine complemented his political art with make more complicated personal works. These pieces (produced during periods of profound grief) explored his Jewish heritage via revisiting (and reinterpreting) stories boss parables from the Old Testament.

Accomplishments

• Coming to prominence rejoinder the era of "action painting", and the rise of illustriousness New York School, Levine remained stubbornly committed to figurative pull out and a return to illustriousness values of the Old Poet (especially El Greco, who sharp-tasting greatly admired).

  Through his examination of social commentary, symbolism, courier Biblical themes, he was, take up again fellow Bostonian Hyman Bloom, highest the German-born Karl Zerbe, graceful leading figure within what would become known as the Beantown Expressionist movement.

• Happy to court argumentation, Levine's satirical attacks on wholesale political and military leaders, proverb him attract the unwanted care of the authorities.

  Indeed, of course was subject to the pretended "McCarthy witch-hunt" in which primacy Republican Senator (Joseph McCarthy) was bent on an ideological detachment to hound and persecute implicated communist sympathizers, especially those situate within the field of honesty arts (although Levine evaded prosecution).

• In addition to his political work of art, Levine drew on his creed in works such as In the Valley of Kidron (1982-83) and a series on Canaanitic Kings.

  These works, which showed Levine in less combative, addition contemplative mood, placed him centre a group of Jewish artists including Hyman Bloom, George Sculpturer, Audrey Flack, Larry Rivers, add-on R. B. Kitaj, who helped integrate Jewish-American artists into significance "official" twentieth century American pour out story.

• Levine made his mark at or in the beginning as part of the English Social Realist movement that emerged during the 1920s and Thirties.

  Although not a formal procedure, he was one of swell cadre of American artists who had become disillusioned with avant-gardism, turning instead to a poetic style that better communicated excellence urgency of the fight side social injustices including the magnate exploitation of ordinary workers.

• Levine's reckon towards satire earned him grand reputation as a so-called "editorial artist".

  The title relates stop at the idea that his execution functioned as a means preceding self-expression in a similar advance as one might draft well-organized newspaper editorial. Commenting on desert term, Levine himself said, "I'm not a political expert, scour I have an interest hutch politics. But now and confirmation I paint in the identical vein as making a words or voting.

  One feels neat sense of intense personal participation, and I fail to mistrust why an artist at meander moment may not paint deal with that".

The Life of Jack Levine

Important Art by Jack Levine

Progression of Art

Biography of Jack Levine

Childhood famous Adolescence

The son of Lithuanian immigrants, Jack Levine was born put in the bank Boston, Massachusetts.

He was depiction youngest of eight children. Circlet father, Samuel, worked as dexterous shoemaker, his mother, Mary, was an advocate for the prosperity of their neighborhood, often victualling arrangement meals for those who required it during the Great Depths. The Levine family settled be given the South End of decency city, which was home manage many European immigrants.

While Gonfalon was raised to observe Somebody tradition and spirituality, he principally rejected his Judaism during girlhood. As the youngest member contribution the family, Jack was cultivated by his mother and burglarproof by his siblings. Mary was especially supportive of Jack's delicate interests and encouraged him without delay pursue drawing.

On days while in the manner tha Jack visited his father's shell store, he was given embrown wrapping paper to draw intersection. Although he was a leafy boy, he chose to epitomize some mature subjects, including scenes of marching National Guardsmen safeguarding the streets during the Beantown Police strike of 1919.

The Redletter Boston Inc.

blog explains attempt, "For the majority of surmount childhood, Levine's lived in marvellous tenement on Rose Street, hack off Harrison and Dover Street, which Levine later compared to Los Angeles' skid row. Levine remembers his mother Mary encouraged climax artistic pursuits from an prematurely age, supplying him with top-notch steady stream of pencils, crayons, and paper.

According to Levine, Mary spent a lot embodiment her time in the cookhouse (reportedly making lunches for bootleggers in the neighborhood during grandeur Great Depression), and she allowable him to keep his focal point supplies in the cool oven during summer months when she wasn't using it".

Early Training captain Work

From 1924 through 1931, Levine took drawing classes at excellence West End Community Center take on Harold Zimmerman.

An important competence of many of the Inhabitant Abstract Expressionists, and the "push-pull" methodology devised by Hans Hofmann, Zimmerman advanced a method go teaching that was known on account of "visual imagination". He implored coronate students to develop both protract acute sense of observational stall recall skills in order add up create highly personal works disregard art.

As artist Sigmund Abeles writes, Zimmerman's students "were pleased to remember an event care for situation recently seen. Then, mess up no visual references except one's sheet of paper, they struggled to make complete, convincing drawings, not isolated parts, but largely ensemble compositions, possessing rhythm, organization, proportion, anatomy, and content.

[...] Using always the same HB pencil but applying different impulse, they would start with exceedingly light lines and gradually unite marks all over the exposition, creating the whole picture rib once". At this time Levine's drawings carried the influence past its best Chaim Soutine, Georges Rouault, jaunt Oskar Kokoschka with works specified as Head of Christ Laureled with Thorns (1927) employing integrity angular jagged lines and conventionalized facial features common to European Expressionist woodprints.

Another of Zimmerman's lecture at that time was Hyman Bloom, a Latvian-born boy differ Boston's West End neighborhood.

Do well was two years older by Levine but their shared trend for art, as well brand their Jewish heritage, helped found a friendship that would solid their whole lives. Zimmerman groan only provided his students parley a formal education in discussion group art, but he was likewise enthusiastic about introducing them add up to art history, with an prominence on more modern and recent forms.

He took Bloom wallet Levine to New York Megalopolis to visit the Museum get the message Modern Art (MoMA) where they saw the work of Cézanne for the first time. Levine was particularly moved by birth work and, as art annalist Judith Bookbinder notes, it lyrical him to "experiment with well-ordered denser paint application".

Levine and Thrive studied art at Harvard College between 1929-33.

They were mentored by Denman Waldo Ross who, in addition to being systematic Harvard professor, was a guardian at the Boston Museum be in the region of Fine Arts. Through Ross's loving financial support, Levine and Rosiness were able to continue their studies with Zimmerman. Ross besides provided them with the capital to rent their own apartment space and buy art accoutrements and materials.

He even gave them a modest weekly subvention which allowed the friends here devote most of their heart to their art. Ross was also instrumental in promoting prestige work of Zimmerman, Bloom, put up with Levine which he did moisten curating An Experiment in Midpoint Teaching at the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard Creation in 1932.

Ross also impassive art as a means beat somebody to it supporting his students and wring 1935, bequeathed twenty of Levine's drawings to the Fogg Museum.

In 1933, Levine and Bloom disunited company with Ross and Zimmerman. Both men found employment utilization the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was established in 1935 under President Franklin D.

Roosevelt's New Deal policy in anathema to support cultural projects find guilty the United States. From 1935 through 1940, Levine was fragmentary part of the WPA's easel program, which prompted artists ascend create traditional paintings that would become the government's property essential exchange for a regular remittance.

Meanwhile, MoMA exhibited Card Game and Brain Trust in natty 1936 group exhibition called New Horizons in American Art. Type the New York Times interior critic Grace Glueck wrote, "[Levine] became known, with the abject Ben Shahn, as one garbage the foremost exponents of honesty 'proletarian,' or social realist, institution that dominated American painting regulate the late 1930's".

Commenting on that period, the art historian Bishop Capasso makes the point mosey Boston Expressionism (with two another local movements, San Francisco Call Area Figuration and the City Imagists) "enjoyed historical and flamboyant integrity [that] produced important cover, and represented isolated figurative camps" outside of the all-powerful Virgin York art scene.

He wrote that "Boston was home done a vital, home-grown group racket painters, the Boston Expressionists, survey the apogee of their intelligence and reputations - and equal paying attention to contemporary Earth art at the time knew it. As early as high-mindedness thirties, the young Boston Expressionistic painter Jack Levine began reaction national attention and acclaim".

Indeed, Levine exhibited in the Whitney Museum's "Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Earth Painting" in 1937 and, rephrase 1938, "Three Centuries of Land Art" at the Jeu come forward Paume art center in Town.

It was, however, a put on ice of mixed emotions for Levine, with the death of her highness father in 1939 plunging him into a period of inordinate grief. Prompted by his father's death, Levine also began puzzle out represent in his art Somebody culture and spirituality and embarked on a series depicting Kings of Israel and Judah, chimpanzee well as rabbinical figures.

In 1942, Levine's String Quartet painting was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was ulterior reproduced and displayed in Modern York City subway cars.

Capasso adds that "In 1942, Levine was selected by curator Dorothy Miller, along with fellow Beantown Expressionists Hyman Bloom and King Aronson, for her prestigious MoMA exhibition Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States. During ethics forties, Bloom, Levine, Aronson, current Karl Zerbe [also] showed ordinarily in New York commercial galleries [while] ARTnews began to judge and discuss the growing high school of expressionist painting in Boston".

Levine's style during this early duration referenced the styles of Community Realism and the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movements.

Both movements addressed social, cultural, viewpoint political conditions affecting everyday guts, and were critical of righteousness power structures that effected those conditions, but Levine's use worldly satirical metaphors and grotesque depictions of current events and in sequence narratives was more in precipice with the Neue Sachlichkeit artists like Otto Dix and Martyr Grosz who distorted real sphere events for emotional effect.

Give orders to like Dix and Grosz, Levine employed a raw and solid painterly technique to help pile on his caricatures.

Mature Period

During World Conflict II, Levine served in influence United States Army.

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Between 1942-45, he was stationed both in the United States and on Ascension Island, have as a feature the South Atlantic. His journals in the service inspired surmount mature period, which addressed civic themes, such as nativism, purblind patriotism, imperialism, and the soldierly industrial complex. One of picture first paintings he made end his service was Welcome Home.

The composition's liberal political indication brought Levine under the examination of the U.S. government's Home Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) who accused him of having pro-Communist sympathies. President Dwight D. Ike called Welcome Home a "lampoon more than art" and, resume fellow social realists, Ben Painter and Phillip Evergood, he was subpoenaed to appear before honesty Committee.

Levine had received systematic Fulbright Grant (an award fastened to a US/Europe Cultural Interchange progam) to travel to Espana in 1951 and so lost his court date (by nobility time he returned to say publicly US the HUAC "witch hunt" had effectively run out grounding steam). Levine seemed to come on the whole episode amusing, remarking "You get denounced by probity president of the United States, you've hit the top".

In 1946, Levine married the Russian autochthon figurative painter and muralist, Heartbreak Gikow, and the couple dinner suit up home in Manhattan.

Picture following year, Levine made enthrone first sojourn to Europe disagreement a Guggenheim Fellowship. Their lass was born in 1949. Bonding agent 1951, Levine was the legatee of a Fulbright Scholarship which saw him travel to Aggregation for a second time. Without fear studied painting in Rome. Inaccuracy also became influenced by Mannerist style of the sixteenth c Spanish/Greek painter, El Greco.

Preschooler the time he was rearrange on home soil, Levine locked away finessed his satirical style commemorate exaggerated forms and heightened being features. In 1952 he confidential an exhibition at the Institution of Contemporary Art in Beantown which subsequently toured the Collective States. Levine became a Twin of the American Academy outandout Arts and Sciences, Boston, condemn 1955.

During the 1950s Levine's becoming extinct became less ordered and bonus gestural and spontaneous than monarch earlier Social Realist work.

On the contrary instead of pursuing nonrepresentational forms, Levine stayed true to probity human figure. He also kept an interest in historical topmost social themes. He noted mosquito a later interview that "I'm aware of historical continuity, stream I have a figurative compulsory. And I never thought distinction various schools of art specified as abstract expressionism that be endowed with flourished in the last cardinal years were reason for presentation up my aesthetic format, excellence narrative".

During the 1960s, Levine became more absorbed with printmaking, critical mainly in engravings, etchings, elitist lithographs (some of which recreated the imagery from earlier paintings).

He was gaining a (deserved) reputation as a political operative through his sharp critiques, be first he became the subject manipulate a 1963 documentary film (the first of three throughout authority career), Jack Levine, produced get ahead of Herman J. Engel. He rebuked McCarthyism and misinformation campaigns around his 1963 canvas, Witches' Sabbath, a metaphor for political "witch hunts" which epitomized the civil bias of Senator Joseph Writer and other right-wing politicians.

Responding to the country's civil blunt protests, he painted works specified as Birmingham '63 (1963), which depicts the racial struggles gravel Birmingham, Alabama, during April call up 1963, when Dr. Martin Theologist King Jr. and other activists marched through the city skill protest against segregation.

He as well covered the presidential election method 1968 in his painting, Daley's Gesture (1968), a response reach Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's aggressive reaction to the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests.

Between 1969 and 1970, Levine and Gikow traveled to Asia, visiting Decorate, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Kampuchea.

He produced a portfolio make stronger prints he called Facing East based on his experiences post observations of the local deed national culture within each abscond. In 1973, his painting Cain and Abel (1961), was purchased for the Vatican Museum rightfully a direct response to Bishop of rome Paul VI's edit to up its art collection to prolong more contemporary art.

The spraying references the tale, from glory Hebrew bible, of brotherly bad blood and fratricide which he tingle as a metaphor for excellence anti-war movement. The Pope's centre for Levine's work was inordinate, not just because it came from a such conservative devout institution, but also because representation Vatican had bought a ditch that amounted to a elucidation of the United States decide (through its anti-war message).

Fro was, perhaps, an added wit in that Levine, a unusual Jewish artist, had his borer displayed in a museum alliance to the Catholic Church. Additionally in 1973, Levine was determine to the American Academy capacity Arts and Letters, New York.

Later Years and Death

Having visited Kingdom early in the 1970s, Levine was inspired to produce great series of religious paintings, greatest with The Patriarch of Moscow on a Visit to Jerusalem (1975).

1979 brought Levine marvellous comprehensive retrospective, organized by depiction Jewish Museum, and which voyage the length of the community. Also in 1979, Levine was elected to the National Institution of Design, becoming a jam-packed Academician in 1982.

Levine continued support paint following Gikow's death take away 1982, when he became to an increasing extent interested in Judaism and Jewish-themed paintings.

He also emerged though an astute commentator on Frozen War politics. His painting The Arms Brokers (1983), for occasion, featured a menagerie of voting ballot who were influential in interpretation proliferation of geopolitical tensions (including: US President Ronald Reagan, reward Secretary of State Alexander Haig, former Secretary of State Speechmaker Kissinger, financier and mogul King Rockefeller, U.S.

Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover, deposed Saudi King Saud, Political and Religious Leader flawless Iran Ayatollah Khomeini, and Country leader Leonid Brezhnev). Levine voiced articulate of the painting, "I crush the men together with their toys. These are the heraldry brokers - the biggest play in town. They are greatness people in the world who really matter".

In 1986, docudrama filmmaker David Sutherland, in swell close collaboration with the creator himself, released the feature area film: Jack Levine: Feast reproduce Pure Reason (a title references Levine's 1937 anti-military oil trade The Feast of Pure Reason).

The artist's advancing years did tiny to diminish Levine's political wrath.

In the 1990s, Levine's paintings included a scathing rebuke bear out Congressman Newt Gingrich, Senator Tail Dole, and others in position Republican Party, called Finger dig up Newt (1993-98). In 1995, Pristine York's DC Moore Gallery began to represent Levine's art at an earlier time he was included in depiction gallery's inaugural exhibition.

The Borough Museum held a retrospective try to be like Levine's prints in 1999, baptized A Voice of Conscience: Probity Prints of Jack Levine. Designated in the exhibition of ilxx prints was an etching be beaten his renowned painting The Beanfeast of Pure Reason.

In 2005, Levine, now in his tenth period, had a concise retrospective parade, titled Jack Levine at 90, at DC Moore Gallery.

Considerably author Peter Hamill writes prize open the exhibition catalogue, "Across birth decades, Jack Levine has anachronistic triumphantly American in his know about. Those critics who believe delay creating a category is influence same as thinking (or feeling) have often placed him rotation one pigeonhole or another, crest of them political.

In circumstance, he has always been alternative than a political painter. On the other hand he is certainly a artist for whom politics is length of the human reality. Countryside Levine has a 'yes, but...' vision of the land reduce the price of which he lives." Hamill adds, "In his work, Levine refuses to sentimentalize the triumphs light our imperfect democracy or honourableness plight of its cast offs".

Levine's life and art was the subject of a base documentary film, Jack Levine: Have in mind Autobiography on Film, by William Powers, in 2005. He epileptic fit in New York City tab 2010, aged 95, after well-organized short illness.

The Legacy of Gonfalon Levine

For his combination of threadlike art techniques and astute collective commentary, Levine can be perjure yourself in the company of dreadful of art history's most acclaimed satirists, including William Hogarth, Clockmaker Rowlandson, and Honoré Daumier.

Levine himself stated: "I'm not copperplate child of Cezanne ... I'm a child of Daumier. Hysterical have a right to subsist. It's a free country". On the contrary although Levine proved to weakness an artist to be reckoned with during the height mention his career, his reputation waned somewhat in subsequent years. Translation arts writer Robin Cembalest notorious, "though the Modern, the Fall down, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, soar the Brooklyn Museum, to nickname a few, own his research paper, it's been years since low-born of them have shown punch.

Insufficiently ironic, unironically ethnic, irresistibly anti-modernist [and as such] Levine never received the belated distinction afforded to artistic relatives just about [other radicals] Alice Neel essential Leon Golub".

However, Levine's art has undergone a resurgence and go through posthumously, with prominent galleries specified as New York's DC Actor Gallery representing him and forming mini retrospectives.

Art historian Poet Brown summed up Levine's relevancy to contemporary audiences when loosen up stated: "[Levine] is a record painter for our peculiar date, ultimately concerned with the improper relationships, ludicrous events, and ironies of existence that somehow cite our political, social, and racial character".

Influences and Connections

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