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Jack Levine wasn’t supposed to be Jack Levine. His parents Samuel and Mary, two Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, had every intent of naming him Jacob, after his grandfather. But a stubborn eldest brother (“a terrible conformist,” Levine later quipped) insisted otherwise. Jacob wasn’t American enough; he’d stick out rather than fit in. Assimilationism prevailed—Jack it would be. 24 years later, in 1939, Levine’s father died. Among his eight siblings, Levine was the only one to take the 11-month recitation of Kaddish (the mourner’s prayer) seriously. Historically, Levine wasn’t much of an observant Jew, forgoing Hebrew school and his Bar Mitzvah. But this was a turning point in his life and in his art. Up until then, Levine’s works had largely consisted of skewering, satirical commentaries taking on racism, corruption, and other societal ills in the modern United States. From 1939 onward, though, there would be a parallel thread in his oeuvre, more timeless and introspective. More Jewish. Shammai is one of the paintings in Levine’s series of Jewish kings and sages of yore. It was a complex tribute to pay to his father’s legacy and religious beliefs—the Second Commandment prohibits the creation of “graven images,” but the Fifth asks children to honor their parents, and Levine’s parents had fully encouraged this artistic path he’d chosen, giving him the very tools to make those graven images to begin with. Levine knew because of that Second Commandment that there was “a relatively sparse pictorial record of Jewish history or the Jewish imagination.” This knowledge gave him a newfound clarity of aim: “I felt the desire to fill this gap.” The story of Shammai is one that reflects the contradictions at the heart of Levine’s project. Shammai was a Jewish scholar of the first century whose interpretations of Jewish law frequently fell in opposition to those of fellow scholar Hillel. Two schools of thought were born—crudely speaking, Shammai’s more conservative and Hillel’s more liberal—but a voice from heaven decreed that, somehow, both were correct. “These and those are the words of the living God,” the voice proclaimed; and although the instruction was given ultimately to follow Hillel, a precedent was set that multiple truths might coexist, all with equal merit. And it’s right there in the image, these many and messy truths. Shammai is the old world and the new all at once. Levine pulls from the past Rembrandt’s portraiture—its earthen palette, delicate layering of oils, and wash of spiritual light are an obvious reference point here—but the visible drips and gritty texture are a seeming nod to the more modern action painting of the 1940s and 50s. (This is a comparison Levine would have assuredly despised—“I come of people who do not even acknowledge Jesus Christ,” he once remarked. “Why am I supposed to acknowledge Abstract Expressionism?”—but it bears noting nonetheless.) The effect is immediate and stirring. Although Levine is creating a contemporary image, he is situating it in a canon centuries in the making, as if to say this, these images of my people—they have always been here. In 1976, the same year he painted Shammai, Levine gave a talk at an event co-organized by the Vatican Museums and the Smithsonian Institute on “The Influence of Spiritual Inspiration on American Art.”** He was one of only a few Jews asked to speak (Will Barnet was another), and he used the opportunity to clarify what he believed the role of his art to be. He was an “artist priest,” he said, fulfilling the public’s need for meaningful symbols, but also perpetuating his family and his people through stories and iconography. Perhaps it was Jack Levine who’d been making the social realist works, embedding himself in American culture even as he critiqued it. But it was Jacob who reached back into Jewish history, tracing the thread of the diaspora. Shammai is a portrait unearthed and made fresh, refusing its own assimilation. Shammai is Jacob, and it’s Samuel; it’s everyone who came before, and everyone yet to come. (To inquire about this work, please head here.) **Levine’s relationship with the Vatican was a fascinating one. At some point in the 1970s, he turned down a prestigious commission to create a miniature Saint Paul for Pope Paul VI. In 1973, Levine’s painting “Cain and Abel” was accepted into the Vatican Museum’s collection, spurring Pope Paul to remark that his art would always be welcome there—an unusual position for a Jewish artist.
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