Angry Artist

Like ancient Athens, "the Athens of America" has its back streets. Artist Jack Levine was born on one, in Boston's grimy South End, and he has never achieved the coolness and balance of a Phidias or a Copley. He puts his passion into pictures in which rich people look like withered apples seen through a mist of rage.

For 20 months during the war, Technical Sergeant Levine did clerical work in one of the loneliest spots in the world, an Army base on Ascension Island in mid-Atlantic. On the side he painted a Crucifixion for the Catholic chapel. Says he: "The boys needed something to look at on that pile of slag."

This week Levine got a $1,000 welcome home from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of 23 awards to artists, writers and musicians as a "practical recognition" of their past achievements. Among Levine's past achievements: String Quartet, in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, a painting in the Pentagon.

Last week a Manhattan gallery put on a show by six veterans, in which the standout painting was Levine's Welcome Home --a satiric study of a beribboned and be-napkined general at a banquet. Explained Levine: "Some officers lived in a world of their own creation. This general has come home and he's still in that sort of a world. I'm not talking about men like Bradley and Eisenhower. I've never seen them but I have great respect .for them. It's just the big slob who is vice president of the Second National Bank and president of the Chamber of Commerce, only now he's been in the Army. . . . I couldn't say that sort of thing while I was in the service. Now is my time to howl."

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