Jack Levine (January 3, 1915November 8, 2010) was an American Social Realist painter and printmaker best known for his satires on modern life, political corruption, and biblical narratives. Levine is considered one of the key artists of the Boston Expressionist movement. Early life and education Jack Levine was the eighth child born to Samuel and Mary Levine, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in the South End of Boston, where he observed a street life composed of European immigrants and a prevalence of poverty and societal ills, subjects which would inform his work. His mother encouraged him to draw and stored his art materials in the family kitchen. On visits to his father's shoe store, he was given brown wrapping paper on which he would draw. Subjects of his childhood drawings included mature subjects such as National Guardsmen patrolling the streets in military attire during the Boston Police strike of 1919. Levine's first formal artistic education was studying with artist and art educator Harold K. Zimmerman at the Jewish Welfare Center in Roxbury from 1924 to 1931. Another one of Zimmerman's young art students was Hyman Bloom. From 1929 to 1933, Levine and Bloom studied with Denman Ross at Harvard University. As an adolescent, Levine was already, by his own account, "a formidable draftsman". Ross sponsored Bloom and Levine's studies via a weekly stipend, as well as studio space. Career In 1932, Ross included Levine's drawings in an exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, and three years later bequeathed twenty drawings by Levine to the museum's collection. Levine's early work was most influenced by Bloom, Chaïm Soutine, Georges Rouault, and Oskar Kokoschka. Along with Bloom and Karl Zerbe, he became associated with the style known as Boston Expressionism. From 1935 to 1940, he was employed by the Works Progress Administration. In 1936, Levine had his first exhibition of paintings in New York City in New Horizons in American Art at the Museum of Modern Art. The paintings selected for the exhibition were Card Game and Brain Trust, the latter was painted from his observation of life in the Boston Common. In 1937, his The Feast of Pure Reason, a satire of Boston political power, was placed on loan to the Museum of Modern Art. In the same year String Quartet was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and purchased in 1942 by the Metropolitan Museum of