American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists

Provenance:

Kennedy Galleries, New York, New York.

Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, by 1978.

Sotheby's, New York, Sale of March 14, 1996, Lot 176.

Acquired directly from the above sale.

Private Collection, Pennsylvania.

Exhibited:

New York, Kennedy Galleries, "Jack Levine Recent Work", November 8 − 29, 1975, n.p., no. 12, illustrated.

New York, The Jewish Museum, "Jack Levine Retrospective", 1978 − 1980, pp. 24; 26; 50; 57 no. 80, illustrated (traveling to Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach; Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery; Portland Art Museum, Portland; Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul).

Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, "American Masters: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection," 1984-1986, no. 98 (traveling to Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit; Denver Art Museum, Denver; Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio; IBM Gallery of Arts and Sciences, New York; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego; Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans).

Literature:

American Masters: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, 1984, pp. 22, 124, 169, illustrated.

Stephen Robert Frankel, ed., Jack Levine, New York, 1989, pp. 119-121, illustrated.

Lot Note:

Jack Levine has consistently defied categorization. Doggedly attached to the figurative at a time when abstraction came to dominate American Art, he nonetheless rejected outright realism in favor of directness with a critical edge. Distortion became his preferred pictorial vehicle for satire, yielding an aesthetic heavy with social commentary, dark humor, and a relentless desire to probe humanity’s liminal promise and undeniable shortcomings.

Influenced by German expressionism and his family’s Jewish immigrant experience, Levine used slashed brushwork and a dull palette, at times interspersed by harsh, glaring flashes of color, to fill his paintings with a deep sense of angst. He was a prominent member of the Boston Expressionist movement, which started in the 1930s but really prospered in the 1950s all the way through the 1970s. The Patriarch of Moscow on a Visit to Jerusalem was executed in 1975, at the apex of his career. With its monumental size, crowded composition, and humorous twists, the work is arguably the epitome of Levine’s artistic practice.

In The Patriarch, distortion is unmistakable. In a reversal of the Mannerist method, which typically distorts bodies through aggrandizing and elongation, Levine’s figures instead appear disproportionately shaped in a stocky way, lacking refined features. In fact, the entire scene, crowded, stifling, resembles a mass of indistinct bodies shrouded in ponderous garb, emphasizing function over personality. The facial expressions are puzzling in a comical way: mouths gaping or frowning, eyes wide open or crossed, the figures appear confused or transfixed.

Only the central figure, the Patriarch, escapes the conformity of the scene. Facing forward, his right hand blithely gesturing benediction, he seems to be directly addressing the viewer, conveniently shielded by the aviator goggles covering his eyes. Though less farcical than the rest of the crowd, his cavalier posture is still rendered with humor, an inadequate performance for the solemnity usually associated with his position. Levine’s irreverence, signaling a distaste for religious power, is acerbic because it satirizes a very real individual, Patriarch Pimen, who led the Russian Orthodox Church from 1971 until 1990.

In a 1975 interview with the New York Times, Levine said that “editorial utterance is part of self-expression,” an acknowledgment that there is an agenda behind his artistic output, often propelled by a desire to pinpoint and ridicule power and the corrupted or unethical behaviors that derive from it. As an “editorial” artist, Levine actively employs his medium as a meaningful element, a self-consciousness that only adds gusto to the already provocative subtext inherent in his compositions. 

Framed: 92 x 104 x 3 in.

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