CRISIS & DILEMMA

"Proletarian" painting, the high-style school of U.S. art in the late '30s, is out of fashion today--but one of the A students of that school who still commands attention is dour Jack Levine, 37. Even abstractionists, today's darlings (whom he sneeringly refers to as "Space Cadets"), respect his work; and conservative as well as advance-guard museums collect it. This fall Levine's paintings will get more attention than ever before: a retrospective show opens this month at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, and will be seen later at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Washington's Phillips Gallery and other museums.

Levine focuses, with the rapt attention of a G.I. picking lice out of his clothes, on the seamy side of American life. Born and raised in Boston's South End slums, he knows the harsh, scrabbling lives of the poor, and he brings their hurt faces alive in his canvases. The stock characters in Levine's more preachy pictures--fat capitalists, leering politicians and sneering cops--always look like more than types; he paints them with real anger and a genius for caricature.

In technique, Levine is an expressionist. He twists figures and features with an El Greco-like abandon, and trowels on hot & cold colors almost as lavishly as Rouault. But Levine dislikes the term: "Expressionism," he says solemnly, "puts too high a premium on subjective reactions."

Every now & then Levine descends from his propaganda perch to paint a frankly personal picture. Only slightly larger than the reproduction opposite, King Saul carries no message except its touch of pathos. It is the latest of a series of Israelite kings which Levine began as a tribute to his father. The painting served as a relaxation from Levine's big, grim canvases, took years of off & on "fiddling" to finish.

"Perhaps the most apparent thing about artists of the past," muses Levine wistfully, "is their freedom from crisis and dilemma in the sense we find it." Such gentle pictures as King Saul show that Levine need not concern himself with "crisis and dilemma" to achieve high rank among contemporary painters.

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