Easier Levine

At 45, hatchet-faced Jack Levine already possesses as formidable a technical equipment as any American artist. He has studied intensely his chosen masters, from George Grosz back through the Van Eyck brothers, merging their methods with his own. He can paint small and smooth, or big and rough, hot or cold, sunny or satiric. Yet Levine is best known for his editorializing pictures, such as Welcome Home (a piggish general at a banquet), which was included in the American painting exhibition in Moscow last summer and made President Eisenhower indignant. Asked about Welcome Home, Levine recalled with a tight smile that he had painted it just after returning from Army service in World War II, "and I thought the war was over."

Levine's own war with social evils will never be over, but it is intermittent. Perfectionism has been a far more persistent element in his work than satire, and often his results have been too rich and mannered. But last week, at Manhattan's Alan Gallery, Levine exhibited a new surprisingly natural and easy side. Eight of the 14 paintings were produced in four months last fall, a prodigious rate of speed. Levine explains that he got into the habit of taking his daughter to school every morning, and "then there was nothing to do but paint for the rest of the day."

More important was the fact that Levine had spent the summer touring European museums "in search of sustenance." What struck him especially about the great Titians and Velasquezes at the Prado was that they were unforced; clearly the masters did not desperately strive to paint masterpieces, and Levine resolved to imitate them.

As his lowering 1932 demonstrated, relaxation meant no diminishing of power in Levine's case. He succeeded in painting a poisonous peach with its fuzz intact. The canvas represented the transfer of power from Von Hindenburg to young Hitler (which actually occurred in 1933), and the beginning of a black and bloody era for Europe. Hovering over the transfer was a third malevolent figure, dimly resembling both Goebbels and Von Ribbentrop. The scene was shadowy, casual, foreboding and, finally, as Levine intended, horrifying.

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