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Dimensions: 24 by 21 in. (61.0 by 53.3 cm)
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Provenance: Alan Gallery, New York
L. Arnold Weissberger, New York
Sale: Christie's, New York, March 11, 1988, lot 289 illustrated
Midtown Galleries, New York
Private collection, Texas (sold: Sotheby's, New York, December 3, 1997, lot 177, illustrated in color)
Acquired at the above sale
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Exhibited: New York, The American Federation of Arts, Jack Levine Retrospective Exhibition, September-November 1960, no. 30
Mexico City, Mexico, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Artes Plasticas, Segunda Bienal Inter Americana
Portland, Maine, Temple Beth El Art Festival, no. 24, n.d.
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Literature: Frank Geithlein, Jack Levine, New York, 1966, illustrated pl. 125 and 126 (detail)
Stephen Robert Frankel and Jack Levine, Jack Levine, New York, 1989, p. 91, illustrated in color
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Notes:
Jack Levine writes: "Like Rubens, I love to paint flesh. Adjectives like lambent, coruscating, iridescent glowing - that is what I am after. I want to incorporate the nude into my work. I want to, even though I am a satirist and even though I sometimes feel like sermonizing, because I see no harm in having an attractive body in there once in a while. So I worked out an iconography which might be 'The Three Graces.' It might be 'The Judgment of Paris.' When you paint the female figure without a model, you're seeing and not seeing. But I am not the kind of artist that makes a Greek amphora, and while I admire the airfoil wing of a plane, I am not so much for these long, extended lines. The long-legged Harper's Bazaar model isn't really my thing, and so my figures are apt to be a little dumpy and a little clumsy, and moreover, that's the human body as I do it. I see it as everyone else sees it, but I don't do what I see. Physiognomists, never do as much with the body as they do with the head. This is true of people like Rembrandt or even Daumier, and in my small way, I think I'm like that too" (Jack Levine, 1989, p. 91).
