Art: BUCKING THE TREND

THE Chicago Art Institute’s 61st annual roundup of contemporary American painting and sculpture, which opens next week, will prove once again that the nation’s artists are mostly sold on some form of abstraction. Doubtless most of the prizes, too, will go to pictures unlikely to win a popularity, or even most of the prizes, too, will go to pictures unlikely to win a popularity, or even intelligibility, contest. But ordinary visitors, to whom the latest fashions in art are immaterial, may find Jack Levine’s trend-bucking canvas (opposite) one of the most rewarding things in the show.

Levine himeself was once the lastest thing. With Ben Shahn, he dominated the “Proletarian” school of painting fashionable in the laste 1930s. Slum-born (in South Boston) a youthful hater of cops and capitalists, Levine rightly thought himself “equipped to punish.” He used his genious for caricature and opulent colors like a jolting left hook to attack what he considered the evils of society. Now a hatchet-faced 39, Levine has simmered down some. “Don’t call me angry,” he says, with a thin smile. More important, Levine has steadily improved both as a painter and as an ovserver. In his words, he “used to be a puncher” and is now “a boxer.”

The Trial occupied Levine all last winter. In the process it developed from a sharply specific protest picture into an anxious generalization. He started with the notion of “painting a Negro being tried by a bunch of whites. Later,” he explains, “the Negro dropped out of it, leaving just the judge, lofty and bespectacled, a record, a dignified bunch of lawyers and some unimportant guy in the box.” With these few dim figures, around a judge’s bench, Levine brilliantly evokes an air of weirness and worry, weighted with wiles and latent threat.