Jack Levine 1915 - 2010

Kennedy Galleries, New York (as agent)
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1983

Jack Levine and Milton Brown, Jack Levine, New York, 1989, p. 133, illustrated in color p. 132

Born in 1915, Jack Levine's early years were spent living among the impoverished in Boston's South End. Despite moving to a better section of the city at the age of eight, Levine always felt attached to the experience of growing up in a lower class neighborhood. Levine is best known for his satires on political corruption and modern life, which attack those individuals and institutions he holds responsible for social exploitation. As an artist primarily concerned with the condition of man, Levine wrote, "The satirical direction I have chosen is an indication of my disappointment in man, which is the opposite way of saying that I have high expectations for the human race" (Jack Levine and Stephen Frankel, Jack Levine, New York, 1989, pg. 8).

Levine enrolled in classes at the Museum of Fine Arts School in 1924 and received free lessons after his talents were recognized by Dr. Denman Ross of Harvard University. As a student, Levine immersed himself in the history of art and measured himself against the artistic standards of his predecessors, most notably the works of Rembrandt, Titian and El Greco. From the very beginning, he was a figurative painter and throughout his career he showed an unwillingness to conform to popular forms of artistic expression. At the age of twenty he joined the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, where he worked for five years. Working for the FAP "American artists were, in a sense, being impelled economically and ideologically into a new social responsibility" (Jack Levine and Stephen Frankel, Jack Levine, New York, 1989, pg. 10). In this climate, Levine used his art for social ends by treating it as a weapon to deal with the fundamental problems of contemporary society, which included class struggle, war, riots, unemployment, and injustice. Following a stint in the army, Levine moved to New York City in 1946 and began exhibiting his paintings in prominent public institutions. While Levine achieved success, he "kept alive the fires of compassion and indignation that feed his art" (Frank Getlein, Jack Levine, New York, 1966, pg. 9).

In The Arms Brokers, Levine has populated the painting with important historical figures some of whom are dressed in uniform. At the center of the work sits Ronald Reagan who is surrounded by Alexander Haig, a secret service agent, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, a Russian Army Officer, Admiral Rickover, King Saud, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Leonid Brezhnev and a British Officer. Isolated portraits of power, the figures neither look nor interact with each other, but stare out into a void, their faces partly hidden from the viewer by varying degrees of smudged shadows. Areas of saturated red, the color of blood, run through the composition's background and the table in the lower register, even reflecting in Kissinger's eyeglasses and those of the Russian Army Officer's in the lower left corner. The men gather around a table of military toys, including an aircraft carrier, a fighter plane, and what appears to be a submarine torpedo in the hand of Admiral Rickover. Overhead another fighter plane hovers in front of the stars and stripes of the American flag and over the heads of the ultimate "hawks" in the arms race, Reagan, Brezhnev and Haig. In an interview Levine wrote, "I brought the men together with their toys. These are the arms brokers – the biggest game in town. They are the people in the world who really matter" (Jack Levine and Stephen Frankel, Jack Levine, New York, 1989, p. 133).

In The Arms Brokers, Levine applies slashing strokes of color in thin layers of oil; his application of glazes creating a sparkling surface in which flesh and metal reflect the distorting accents of shimmering light. Levine has described his technique as Old Master Pudding, which incorporates a modern Social Realism that borrows from the techniques of Rembrandt and El Greco.

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 Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art and others. In 1973, the Vatican purchased one of his works.