Jack Levine

Jack Levine , 1915-, American painter, b. Boston. Levine began his career with the Federal Arts Project. His paintings treat social themes in a bitter, satirical vein. They are executed with diffused, prismatic textural effects. The persons he portrays are the essence of corruption, withered, distorted, yet glittering. Among his most celebrated paintings are Gangster Funeral (Whitney Mus., New York City), The Feast of Pure Reason and Election Night (both: Mus. of Modern Art, New York City), Welcome Home (Brooklyn Mus.), and The Trial (Art Inst., Chicago).

Levine, Jack (1915– ). American painter and draughtsman, born in Boston. As a child he had lessons at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston and from 1929 to 1933 he attended painting classes at Harvard University. From 1935 to 1940 he worked intermittently for the Federal Art Project. Levine is an independent figure, standing apart from groups and movements, and his work is highly distinctive. His style is based upon Expressionists of the École de Paris such as Rouault and Soutine, but the theme of his art is social satire, through which he mercilessly attacks avarice, corruption, and hypocrisy. His best-known work is Gangster Funeral (Whitney Museum, New York, 1953), which shows policemen and political leaders gathered in mourning around a mobster's coffin. For all the savagery of his imagery, there is much subtlety of handling in his work, and he is deeply aware of the work of the Old Masters as well as of contemporary painting; he thinks it is the artist's function to bring ‘the great tradition and whatever is great about it up to date'. Levine has also done gentler satires, poking fun at middle-class pretensions, as well as straightforward portraits, and in the 1980s he turned to serious depictions of biblical subjects.