City Lights

Jack Levine’s parents were Lithuanian Jews who immigrated to Boston before the turn of the 20th century. Showing early promise, he began art classes at age eight, studying at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Saturday School and the West End Community Center. His early training emphasized the work of Diego Velázquez, El Greco, Francisco de Goya, and Peter Paul Rubens, as well as modern Expressionist painters such as Georges Rouault and Chaim Soutine. Imaginative drawing, or re-creating from memory what he had observed, was encouraged by his teachers along with a thorough understanding of color theory. After participating periodically in the Easel Division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project in the 1930s, he was drafted by the army in 1942, and toward the end of World War II was transferred to New York City. By then he was known as a Social Realist who satirically explored political corruption and human foibles through a painterly Expressionist style.

City Lights was painted in response to the death of Levine’s father in 1939. An eerie night scene, the painting is lit not by the stars, but by the artificial lights of the city. The constricted, shallow space is filled with objects conjured through jagged, slashing brushstrokes. Three suited men, who are working class like Levine’s father, are positioned in a semicircle, standing on a section of a brick street. Characteristic of Levine’s figures, they are short with large heads. Emphasis is placed on their fleshy, thickly painted faces, which provide a living contrast with the ethereal skull above them. The empty sockets of the skeleton are aligned with the eyes of the figure below, a link between the living and the dead that instigates a macabre dialogue between the viewer and the painting. Overall, the impression created is bleak, grim, and threatening.