Posted on 11/09/2010 11:29:25 AM PST by Borges
The social realist artist Jack Levine, who skewered the rich and powerful in paintings that echoed Old Masters like Goya and El Greco stylistically, has died. He was 95.
Levine's son-in-law, Leonard Fisher, said the artist died Monday at his New York City home.
Levine's works are in the collections of major museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Born in Boston in 1915, Levine found work as a young man with the federal Works Progress Administration. He achieved wide recognition when his 1937 painting "The Feast of Pure Reason," a critique of political corruption, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.
Levine's career was interrupted by a stint in the Army from 1942 to 1945. After the war he married artist Ruth Gikow and moved to New York.
His 1946 painting "Welcome Home," a satire of military power, generated controversy when it was later shown in a State Department exhibition that travelled to Moscow.
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And now you can...
"The Daley." (I presume the current Mayor's father)
RIP.
(a panorama of his work)
It must have been tricky once he became rich - did he lose his inspiration?
I’m sure many self-hating rich Democrats fell all over themselves to shovel money into his pocket in exchange for being insulted by him.
Mr Levine
He probably lost his inspiration once the Soviet Union collapsed.
The taxpayers funded him through the WPA and the major corporations and endowments funded him through institutionalization. How many of his paintings have been bought at auction with public funds?
“Levine’s works are in the collections of major museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.”
I always thought Frank Lloyd Write was skewering the rich people who paid big bucks for his stuff. Stairways to nowhere, etc.
***Born in Boston in 1915, Levine found work as a young man with the federal Works Progress Administration.****
Back in the 1930s there was plenty of work in the East for an artist doing pulp magazine covers.
The federal government hired many artists who couldn’t make it in the REAL WORLD with this guideline, they must not have a real job in the art industry but could only work for government pay on government projects.
“Ridiculed the rich???”
That’s absurd. It hardly matters what his political inclinations were (though we can assume what they were when he was young during the WPA)-—what I see in all those thumbnails is a great caricaturist, whose violent, colorful style is itself a daring act of ridicule, with its targets always being THE POWERFUL. I like the Daley ‘throat-cutting’ image, and the barbed title THE GREAT SOCIETY , from the LBJ period showing the tuxedo’d swells enjoying their own ‘great society’.
Why would any one want to hang such ugly art in their home?
This guy was just another Socialist along the lines of Ben Shahn and Georg Grosz, but without the gritty edge. Just a glorified cartoonist. Dime a dozen.
Looks like it was and still is his pipe dream.
Favorite Item in the Apartment: "A massive painting that I got in Iran, a few years ago, by Farideh Lashai, a friend who is also Iran’s pre-eminent abstract-expressionist painter. It gives me joy every time I walk in my door." Christiane Amapour
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