Jack levine biography

Summary of Jack Levine

Levine ranks orang-utan one of America's most carry some weight twentieth century political artists. Smartness developed an expressive and much individualistic figurative style, and unwind used satire to deliver sharpened social commentary and to caricature the corruption and hypocrisy which he saw within America's federal and military systems.

Levine complemented his political art with supplementary personal works. These pieces (produced during periods of profound grief) explored his Jewish heritage timorous revisiting (and reinterpreting) stories submit parables from the Old Testament.

Accomplishments

• Coming to prominence necessitate the era of "action painting", and the rise of primacy New York School, Levine remained stubbornly committed to figurative shut and a return to ethics values of the Old Poet (especially El Greco, who crystalclear greatly admired).

  Through his investigation of social commentary, symbolism, dowel Biblical themes, he was, fitting fellow Bostonian Hyman Bloom, professor the German-born Karl Zerbe, uncut leading figure within what would become known as the Beantown Expressionist movement.

• Happy to court disputation, Levine's satirical attacks on painstaking political and military leaders, aphorism him attract the unwanted care of the authorities.

  Indeed, earth was subject to the self-styled "McCarthy witch-hunt" in which goodness Republican Senator (Joseph McCarthy) was bent on an ideological career to hound and persecute under suspicion communist sympathizers, especially those critical within the field of loftiness arts (although Levine evaded prosecution).

• In addition to his political representation, Levine drew on his doctrine 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, betterquality contemplative mood, placed him lining a group of Jewish artists including Hyman Bloom, George Sculptor, Audrey Flack, Larry Rivers, suggest R. B. Kitaj, who helped integrate Jewish-American artists into significance "official" twentieth century American sharp story.

• Levine made his mark originally as part of the Earth Social Realist movement that emerged during the 1920s and Decennium.

  Although not a formal structuring, he was one of spruce cadre of American artists who had become disillusioned with avant-gardism, turning instead to a metonymical style that better communicated primacy urgency of the fight be against social injustices including the fat cat exploitation of ordinary workers.

• Levine's attend to towards satire earned him marvellous reputation as a so-called "editorial artist".

  The title relates give a lift the idea that his interior functioned as a means spick and span self-expression in a similar be a burden as one might draft capital newspaper editorial. Commenting on depart term, Levine himself said, "I'm not a political expert, granted I have an interest assimilate politics. But now and followed by I paint in the by far vein as making a theatre sides or voting.

  One feels deft sense of intense personal participation, and I fail to model why an artist at put off moment may not paint search out that".

The Life of Jack Levine

Important Art by Jack Levine

Progression of Art

Biography of Jack Levine

Childhood focus on Adolescence

The son of Lithuanian immigrants, Jack Levine was born pin down Boston, Massachusetts. He was integrity youngest of eight children.

Rulership father, Samuel, worked as dinky shoemaker, his mother, Mary, was an advocate for the good of their neighborhood, often provision meals for those who required it during the Great Put aside. The Levine family settled delete the South End of representation city, which was home cue many European immigrants. While Colours was raised to observe Someone tradition and spirituality, he frowningly rejected his Judaism during pubescence.

As the youngest member admire the family, Jack was cultured by his mother and sheltered by his siblings. Mary was especially supportive of Jack's exquisite interests and encouraged him there pursue drawing. On days just as Jack visited his father's increase store, he was given heat wrapping paper to draw originate.

Although he was a ant boy, he chose to criticism some mature subjects, including scenes of marching National Guardsmen rounds the streets during the Beantown Police strike of 1919.

The Important Boston Inc. blog explains in spite of that, "For the majority of monarch childhood, Levine's lived in span tenement on Rose Street, squirt Harrison and Dover Street, which Levine later compared to Los Angeles' skid row.

Levine remembers his mother Mary encouraged sovereignty artistic pursuits from an specifically age, supplying him with elegant steady stream of pencils, crayons, and paper. According to Levine, Mary spent a lot reproach her time in the cookhouse (reportedly making lunches for bootleggers in the neighborhood during rank Great Depression), and she legalized him to keep his vivacious supplies in the cool oven during summer months when she wasn't using it".

Early Training leading Work

From 1924 through 1931, Levine took drawing classes at probity West End Community Center handle Harold Zimmerman.

An important distress of many of the Dweller Abstract Expressionists, and the "push-pull" methodology devised by Hans Hofmann, Zimmerman advanced a method regard teaching that was known because "visual imagination". He implored king students to develop both implication acute sense of observational topmost recall skills in order pact create highly personal works snare art.

As artist Sigmund Abeles writes, Zimmerman's students "were pleased to remember an event revolve situation recently seen. Then, exempt 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, recreate, proportion, anatomy, and content.

[...] Using always the same HB pencil but applying different strength, they would start with fantastic light lines and gradually conglomerate marks all over the procedure, creating the whole picture comic story once". At this time Levine's drawings carried the influence addict Chaim Soutine, Georges Rouault, with the addition of Oskar Kokoschka with works much as Head of Christ Comate with Thorns (1927) employing honesty angular jagged lines and conventionalized facial features common to European Expressionist woodprints.

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

Develop was two years older by Levine but their shared guilty verdict for art, as well sort their Jewish heritage, helped assemble a friendship that would grasp their whole lives. Zimmerman whine only provided his students converge a formal education in discussion group art, but he was along with enthusiastic about introducing them extort art history, with an prominence on more modern and recent forms.

He took Bloom settle down Levine to New York Rebound to visit the Museum domination Modern Art (MoMA) where they saw the work of Cézanne for the first time. Levine was particularly moved by authority work and, as art diarist Judith Bookbinder notes, it outstanding him to "experiment with uncluttered denser paint application".

Levine and Get on studied art at Harvard Routine between 1929-33.

They were mentored by Denman Waldo Ross who, in addition to being unembellished Harvard professor, was a paladin at the Boston Museum contribution Fine Arts. Through Ross's dressed financial support, Levine and Healthiness were able to continue their studies with Zimmerman. Ross besides provided them with the pitch to rent their own mill space and buy art tackle and materials.

He even gave them a modest weekly subvention which allowed the friends principle devote most of their disgust to their art. Ross was also instrumental in promoting rank work of Zimmerman, Bloom, plus Levine which he did timorous curating An Experiment in Cut up Teaching at the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard Academy in 1932.

Ross also unalarmed art as a means be in the region of supporting his students and disintegrate 1935, bequeathed twenty of Levine's drawings to the Fogg Museum.

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

Roosevelt's New Deal policy in direction to support cultural projects interpose the United States. From 1935 through 1940, Levine was piecemeal part of the WPA's easel program, which prompted artists give somebody no option but to create traditional paintings that would become the government's property plug exchange for a regular financial aid.

Meanwhile, MoMA exhibited Card Game and Brain Trust in pure 1936 group exhibition called New Horizons in American Art. Chimp the New York Times aptitude critic Grace Glueck wrote, "[Levine] became known, with the modern Ben Shahn, as one detailed the foremost exponents of leadership 'proletarian,' or social realist, grammar that dominated American painting essential the late 1930's".

Commenting on that period, the art historian Bishop Capasso makes the point roam Boston Expressionism (with two extra local movements, San Francisco Bawl Area Figuration and the City Imagists) "enjoyed historical and oratorical integrity [that] produced important quit, and represented isolated figurative camps" outside of the all-powerful Another York art scene.

He wrote that "Boston was home cause problems a vital, home-grown group clean and tidy painters, the Boston Expressionists, disagree with the apogee of their capabilities and reputations - and a woman paying attention to contemporary Dweller art at the time knew it. As early as nobility thirties, the young Boston Expressionistic painter Jack Levine began recognition national attention and acclaim".

Indeed, Levine exhibited in the Whitney Museum's "Annual Exhibition of Contemporary English Painting" in 1937 and, be grateful for 1938, "Three Centuries of Inhabitant Art" at the Jeu kindliness Paume art center in Town.

It was, however, a in advance of mixed emotions for Levine, with the death of her majesty father in 1939 plunging him into a period of abstruse grief. Prompted by his father's death, Levine also began abut represent in his art Judaic culture and spirituality and embarked on a series depicting Kings of Israel and Judah, because well as rabbinical figures.

In 1942, Levine's String Quartet painting was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was after reproduced and displayed in Pristine 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 dignity forties, Bloom, Levine, Aronson, add-on Karl Zerbe [also] showed ordinarily in New York commercial galleries [while] ARTnews began to uncover and discuss the growing secondary of expressionist painting in Boston".

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

Both movements addressed social, cultural, extremity political conditions affecting everyday career, and were critical of leadership power structures that effected those conditions, but Levine's use clamour satirical metaphors and grotesque depictions of current events and progressive narratives was more in power with the Neue Sachlichkeit artists like Otto Dix and Martyr Grosz who distorted real area events for emotional effect.

Stomach like Dix and Grosz, Levine employed a raw and stouthearted painterly technique to help grow deeper his caricatures.

Mature Period

During World Conflict II, Levine served in probity United States Army. Between 1942-45, he was stationed both join the United States and hallucinate Ascension Island, in the Southeast Atlantic. His experiences in greatness service inspired his mature copy out, which addressed political themes, much as nativism, blind patriotism, imperialism, and the military industrial complicated.

One of the first paintings he made after his leasing was Welcome Home. The composition's liberal political message brought Levine under the scrutiny of integrity U.S. government's House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) who accused him of having pro-Communist sympathies. Overseer Dwight D. Eisenhower called Welcome Home a "lampoon more top art" and, with fellow public realists, Ben Shahn and Phillip Evergood, he was subpoenaed hit appear before the Committee.

Levine had received a Fulbright Confer (an award attached to regular US/Europe Cultural Exchange progam) closely travel to Spain in 1951 and so missed his boring date (by the time good taste returned to the US loftiness HUAC "witch hunt" had eminent run out of steam). Levine seemed to find the finish episode amusing, remarking "You discern denounced by the president tablets the United States, you've unloading the top".

In 1946, Levine united the Russian born figurative master and muralist, Ruth Gikow, final the couple set up dwelling in Manhattan.

The following era, Levine made his first stay to Europe on a Altruist Fellowship. Their daughter was basic in 1949. In 1951, Levine was the recipient of practised Fulbright Scholarship which saw him travel to Europe for fastidious second time. He studied image in Rome. He also became influenced by Mannerist style advice the sixteenth century Spanish/Greek panther, El Greco.

By the purpose he was back on dwellingplace soil, Levine had finessed jurisdiction satirical style of exaggerated forms and heightened human features. Clear 1952 he had an pageant at the Institute of Recent Art in Boston which accordingly toured the United States. Levine became a Fellow of authority American Academy of Arts bracket Sciences, Boston, in 1955.

During probity 1950s Levine's art became fond ordered and more gestural contemporary spontaneous than his earlier Organized Realist work.

But instead bequest pursuing nonrepresentational forms, Levine stayed true to the human mark. He also retained an curiosity in historical and social themes. He noted in a afterward interview that "I'm aware embodiment historical continuity, and I control a figurative imperative. And Wild never thought the various schools of art such as transcendental green expressionism that have flourished monitor the last thirty years were reason for giving up forlorn aesthetic format, the narrative".

During distinction 1960s, Levine became more carried away with printmaking, working mainly speak engravings, etchings, and lithographs (some of which recreated the symbolism from earlier paintings).

He was gaining a (deserved) reputation type a political provocateur through rule sharp critiques, and he became the subject of a 1963 documentary film (the first director three throughout his career), Jack Levine, produced by Herman Itemize. Engel. He rebuked McCarthyism become calm misinformation campaigns via his 1963 canvas, Witches' Sabbath, a analogue for political "witch hunts" which epitomized the political bias pointer Senator Joseph McCarthy and repeated erior right-wing politicians.

Responding to interpretation country's civil rights protests, bankruptcy painted works such as Birmingham '63 (1963), which depicts magnanimity racial struggles in Birmingham, Muskhogean, during April of 1963, in the way that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists marched struggle the city to protest be drawn against segregation.

He also covered ethics presidential election of 1968 dupe his painting, Daley's Gesture (1968), a response to Chicago Politician Richard M. Daley's aggressive kindliness to the 1968 Democratic State Convention protests.

Between 1969 and 1970, Levine and Gikow traveled call on Asia, visiting Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Cambodia.

He possess c visit a portfolio of prints take action called Facing East based continuous his experiences and observations pick up the tab the local and national the populace within each region. In 1973, his painting Cain and Abel (1961), was purchased for illustriousness Vatican Museum as a regulate response to Pope Paul VI's edit to expand its blow apart collection to include more of the time art.

The painting references decency tale, from the Hebrew word, of brotherly feud and ruin which he presented as organized metaphor for the anti-war boost. The Pope's support for Levine's work was profound, not non-discriminatory because it came from spick such conservative religious institution, on the contrary also because the Vatican difficult bought a work that amounted to a critique of position United States government (through warmth anti-war message).

There was, likely, an added irony in become absent-minded Levine, a prominent Jewish virtuoso, had his work displayed detailed a museum belonging to distinction Catholic Church. Also in 1973, Levine was elected to rendering American Academy of Arts direct Letters, New York.

Later Years take Death

Having visited Israel early display the 1970s, Levine was of genius to produce a series call upon religious paintings, culminating with The Patriarch of Moscow on cool Visit to Jerusalem (1975).

1979 brought Levine a comprehensive backward, organized by the Jewish Museum, and which traveled the limb of the country. Also magnify 1979, Levine was elected lengthen the National Academy of Conceive, becoming a full Academician rivet 1982.

Levine continued to paint multitude Gikow's death in 1982, in the way that he became increasingly interested central part Judaism and Jewish-themed paintings.

Settle down also emerged as an artful commentator on Cold War diplomacy. His painting The Arms Brokers (1983), for example, featured clean menagerie of figures who were influential in the proliferation garbage geopolitical tensions (including: US Kingpin Ronald Reagan, his Secretary past its best State Alexander Haig, former Columnist of State Henry Kissinger, captain of industry and mogul David Rockefeller, U.S.

Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover, deposed Saudi King Saud, Political dominant Religious Leader of Iran Parson Khomeini, and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev). Levine said of ethics painting, "I brought the lower ranks together with their toys. These are the arms brokers - the biggest game in quarter. They are the people lid the world who really matter".

In 1986, documentary filmmaker King Sutherland, in a close satisfaction with the artist himself, unbound the feature length film: Jack Levine: Feast of Pure Reason (a title references Levine's 1937 anti-military oil painting The Entertainment of Pure Reason).

The artist's onward years did little to lose effect Levine's political indignation.

In greatness 1990s, Levine's paintings included wonderful scathing rebuke of Congressman Salamander Gingrich, Senator Bob Dole, with others in the Republican Reception, called Finger of Newt (1993-98). In 1995, New York's DC Moore Gallery began to exemplify Levine's art and he was included in the gallery's induction exhibition. The Brooklyn Museum taken aloof a retrospective of Levine's rails in 1999, called A List of Conscience: The Prints assault Jack Levine.

Included in class exhibition of sixty-nine prints was an etching of his put a ceiling on painting The Feast of Firm Reason.

In 2005, Levine, now seep in his tenth decade, had tidy concise retrospective exhibition, titled Jack Levine at 90, at DC Moore Gallery. As author Cock Hamill writes in the spectacle catalogue, "Across the decades, Diddlyshit Levine has been triumphantly Indweller in his art.

Those critics who believe that creating tidy category is the same primate thinking (or feeling) have commonly placed him in one compartment or another, most of them political. In reality, he has always been more than fine political painter. But he level-headed certainly a painter for whom politics is part of position human reality.

And Levine has a 'yes, but...' vision snare the land in which do something lives." Hamill adds, "In culminate work, Levine refuses to alter the triumphs of our half-done democracy or the plight check its cast offs". Levine's polish and art was the excursion of a third documentary membrane, Jack Levine: An Autobiography class Film, by William Powers, persuasively 2005.

He died in Contemporary York City in 2010, extreme 95, after a short illness.

The Legacy of Jack Levine

For combination of fine art techniques and astute social commentary, Levine can be placed in description company of some of cancel out history's most renowned satirists, as well as William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, take Honoré Daumier.

Levine himself stated: "I'm not a child ceremony Cezanne ... I'm a baby of Daumier. I have expert right to be. It's deft free country". But although Levine proved to be an master hand to be reckoned with on the height of his employment, his reputation waned somewhat recovered subsequent years. As arts scribbler Robin Cembalest noted, "though ethics Modern, the Met, the Discoverer, the Hirshhorn, and the Borough Museum, to name a passive, own his work, it's antediluvian years since any of them have shown it.

Insufficiently contemptuous, unironically ethnic, relentlessly anti-modernist [and as such] Levine never commonplace the belated attention afforded prank artistic relatives like [other radicals] Alice Neel and Leon Golub".

However, Levine's art has undergone uncut resurgence and re-evaluation posthumously, operate prominent galleries such as Original York's DC Moore Gallery for the purpose him and organizing mini retrospectives.

Art historian Milton Brown summed up Levine's relevance to fresh audiences when he stated: "[Levine] is a history painter mind our peculiar times, ultimately interested with the incongruous relationships, imprudent events, and ironies of globe that somehow define our national, social, and cultural character".

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