ΕΝΑΣ ΚΑΛΟΣ ΖΩΓΡΑΦΟΣ ΤΟ 20ού ΑΙΩΝΑ

Jack Levine was born on Jan. 3, 1915, and spent his early childhood in the South End of Boston, the youngest of eight children of immigrant parents from Lithuania. His father was a shoemaker. When he was 8, the family moved to the Roxbury neighborhood, and he began taking children's art classes at the Boston Museum of Art with his friend Hyman Bloom, who also became a well-known painter. The two friends later studied with Harold Zimmerman, a young painter from the museum's art school, at a settlement house in Roxbury.

By a stroke of good fortune, Denman Ross, a patrician professor in Harvard's art department, took Mr. Zimmerman and his two students under his wing. He took Mr. Levine to his home to look at the art treasures on the walls, organized a showing of his drawings at the Fogg Museum while he was still in high school and provided him with a stipend and a studio.

With the Depression raging, Mr. Levine signed on with the Works Progress Administration as an artist and, in 1936, two of his paintings — "Card Game" (1933) and "Brain Trust" (1935) — were included in "New Horizons in American Art," an exhibition of W.P.A. art at the Museum of Modern Art. After completing "The Feast of Pure Reason," he received his first one-man show at the Downtown Gallery in New York in 1939.

Inspired by old masters like Titian, Velázquez and Goya, and German expressionists like George Grosz and Oskar Kokoschka, Mr. Levine took a lofty view of art and the artist's mission. "I took my place in the late 1930s as part of the general uprising of social consciousness in art and literature," he said later. "We were all making a point. We had a feeling of confidence in our ability to do something about the world."

Mr. Levine despised abstract art and bucked the art world's movement toward it, drawing inspiration instead from old masters like Titian and Velázquez. He specialized in satiric tableaus and sharp social commentary directed at big business, political corruption, militarism and racism, with something left over for the comic spectacle of the human race on parade.

Music: "Stitches".

Artist: The Morning Benders.

Album: : Big Echo.