City Boy

The critics have called lean-faced, Boston-born Jack Levine, 35, one of the half-dozen liveliest young painters in the U.S. Some of Levine's own words for himself are "romantic humanitarian," "editorial" artist, "social" artist. In a crowded Back Bay gallery last week, gallerygoers at Levine's first big show got a chance to see for themselves what all the words meant.

The show proved that Levine was certainly a lively painter. His composition was clever and his colors bright. Occasionally, when the editorial mood hit him too hard, he began wagging his brush. Then the result was little better than partisan cartooning, e.g., a soapbox snarl at the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, titled Reception in Miami. But when he chose to paint subjects instead of targets--the grimy street corners of downtown America, a littered store window, a peddler's sway-backed nag or a weary tombstone cutter--Levine had something of his own to say. And he said it with energy.

Levine is determinedly a city boy. The youngest of a Boston shoemaker's eight children, he was upset when his family moved out of the tenements of the South End of Boston to roomier Roxbury. Eight-year-old Jackie was "horrified by the trees and piazzas." He consoled himself "by making drawings of drunkards and other things I remembered."

It was the WPA art project, in the '305, that gave Levine his first real chance to paint. He took a studio back in Boston's soot-filmed slums and began working with the tense brush strokes and smoldering colors of the expressionists he most admired: Rouault, Soutine, Kokoschka.

Soon his well-oiled swipes at prune-wrinkled millionaires and politicians and his nostalgic back-streetscapes began to attract attention. In 1942 his sprightly painting String Quartet won him a $3,000 purchase prize at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the first of a string of awards for Jack Levine.

Some of Levine's latest paintings gave indication that he was losing a little of his early bile. Cartoons in oil like Reception in Miami and Welcome Home, a prod at Army brass, came a little less frequently. "I may have been angry or bitter but I don't stay that way," explained Levine.

Levine's newest interests: Byzantine-rich canvases of imaginary kings, handsome studies of generously fleshed women reminiscent of Rubens and Renoir, playful classical allegories. But he is still a city boy. His next big project, he announced, would be a "gigantic" canvas of a pawnshop. Said Levine: "A pawnshop has everything. A pawnshop means something."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.