The Neighborhood Physician

The son of immigrants from Lithuania, the painter Jack Levine was born in Boston’s South End and grew up in Roxbury. He attended Harvard, where his painting first attracted attention. He was a figurative painter, but his bold use of color and distortion of forms stamped him as a modernist. Much of his painting was overtly political, skewering politicians, capitalists, military men, and racists. After World War II and the Holocaust, he began to paint works with specifically Jewish content. Notable among them was a series of miniature portraits of biblical kings and postbiblical scholars.