Baterbys Art Auction Gallery - Bios

Jack Levine

(1915- ) Born to Lithuanian Jewish parents, Jack Levine is an American Social Realist painter and printmaker best known for his biblical narratives and satires on modern life and political corruption. It was in the South End of Boston that Levine spent his early childhood studying the street life that was heavily occupied by European immigrants, observing the prevalance of poverty and societal ills. By 1932 Levine’s drawings were included in an exhibition by Ross at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Three years later, Ross bequeathed twenty drawings by Levine to the museum’s collection. Levine’s style became later associated with the Boston Expressionism style of painting. Levine’s first major exhibition of paintings in New York City was at the Museum of Modern Art. Levine, in the late 1950s, painted a series of sensitive portraits of his wife and daughter. In the 1960s Levine expanded his subjects of unrest in the United States to include international subjects as well. Levine showed an increased interest in Hebraism and with it a proliferation of paintings with themes from the Old Testament in the 1980s. Today, Levine’s work is featured in many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fogg Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art.