Jack Levine, Witches' Sabbath

Ajouté : 2026-05-31

[00:00:04][music] >> We're in Artbridges storage looking at a very large painting by Jack Levine. This is Witches Sabbath from 1963.

[00:00:16]I look at this piece and I feel like I'm in a fever dream and the piece as a whole is a scathing indictment. Advanced art in 1963 was abstract. It was intensely abstract.

[00:00:32]The work of Kenneth Noland of post-painterly abstraction in the years after abstract expressionism. And yet here's an artist who's creating a kind of modern history painting of US history. And I think also in that commitment to figuration as distorted and creepy and haunting as it is, we also see Jack Levine's roots working for the Works Progress Administration, his social realist background, and the thematic concerns that guided his whole career, which really started in his upbringing in a poor immigrant community in Boston. He was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents and so the kind of poverty conditions, political corruption that was all around him growing up guided his painting throughout his whole life. Even as the art world all around him was at the height of abstraction, he held to this fierce commitment to figuration even while working with the surface of the paint in a really experimental way reminiscent of German Expressionism and of many of the old masters that he cited throughout his career.

[00:01:39]>> That is Rembrandt, Velasquez, Titian, Goya, and more recently people like George Grosz. We can see his interest in these old masters through the multiplicity of the way he touches the canvas with his brush or with his palette knife or for that matter with a rag. The top we have uh Southern Congressman flanked by three Klansmen.

[00:02:01]In the center, we have McCarthy himself.

[00:02:04]Beside him, McCarthy's attorney Roy Cohn. We have a Shriner in the upper right, and then these legionnaires flanking the right side of the piece.

[00:02:11]And originally, there was going to be a witness that they were questioning. Jack Levine explained that he decided it might be more effective to take the witness out of it and make the viewer himself feel like they were the one being questioned by this gathering of ghouls. Clearly, Jack Levine has no sympathy for any of the figures that are being represented here. Each figure is malevolent. And if that wasn't clear enough, Levine has placed a goat on the left side, which with those horns in this context seems to be a kind of satanic figure, perhaps the figure that is orchestrating all of this. The political power that McCarthy wields is focused on destroying the lives of the people who would sit in the chair where we sit as we look at this painting. And this topic for Levine was not only something that he had experienced around him in the broader national moment, but something that he personally had run into himself. A painting of his had been exhibited in Moscow in 1959 in an exhibit on American culture, and that had raised suspicions with the House Un-American Activities Committee, leading to them questioning him. And so, he was familiar with the power of this ruthless interrogation. And he really wants to make that clear in this piece.

[00:03:31]And in the title, which is Sabbath, does not mince words about the artist's opinions of the figures present. And we have these stool pigeons in the center of the table, who are sort of acting as the informants to these men. And that connection is drawn out even further by the matching qualities of the paint across the pigeon's feather and McCarthy's tie. We have this pumpkin in the foreground. The pumpkin is amazing.

[00:03:57]Of course, it references night, the possibility of witchcraft, the occult.

[00:04:02]But look at it. It's painted orange at the top, and then it seems to have been broken into. But look at that paint. It is just paint in the most beautiful, luscious sense. And then he places this deep, saturated purple right before that orange, which is creating this fantastic contrast of color. And it's a little bit hard to read what that object is. Is it a flask? Is it a candle? And there's a second one just to the left. And of course, between those two is this fabulous typewriter. One of the things that's so striking to me about this piece is the way that the faces of the figures, while expressionistic and distorted, are portraits. They're very recognizable. But Levine still uses the hands to create this conspiratorial, claustrophobic, cacasonous feeling of this late-night horror show. And the paint itself moves in and out. We have these brilliant passages. Roy Cohn's shirt, for example.

[00:05:01]But then his shoulder and lapel recede into the darkness, recede into space. In fact, it's impossible to determine where one shoulder ends and the next begins.

[00:05:11]We have that same effect with the goat and the white shirt of this congressman on the left, where they sort of dissolve into one another and that space muddies and blurs until you have the sense that almost rather than individual people, this whole chorus in front of us is this one ugly machine. The sense of ugliness, I think, extends even to Levine's conception of American history. Look at the way that the clansmen's hoods and the American flag almost seem to be parting on either side of a window as if they were curtains. In In words, they reflect each other. But the aspect of this painting that seems to me most extraordinary is the way that our eye travels from looking down at the desk before us, as if we are seated here, and then across that tabletop. We can't see these things in real life at the same moment, but here it's as if time has collapsed and we can see these things in an instant together. And the scale of the piece makes it such that when you look down to the table and material that's ostensibly in front of you, who is the witness, you have almost a sense of vertigo. The whole thing is fearfully disoriented. It's almost as if Levine is harnessing centuries of artistic techniques, looking to the old masters, looking to German Expressionism, all to mount this one monumental, scathing criticism of the state of American democracy.

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