Jack Levine, Witches' Sabbath

Why It Matters

Witches’ Sabbath is a forceful example of midcentury figurative art deployed as political resistance, showing how artists preserved historical memory and critiqued abuses of power when dominant trends favored abstraction. Its visual rhetoric remains relevant for understanding how art can expose and personalize mechanisms of repression.

Summary

Jack Levine’s 1963 canvas Witches’ Sabbath is a large, expressionistic political indictment that reconvenes figuration against the era’s dominant abstraction to attack McCarthyism and systemic corruption. The painting clusters recognizably grotesque portraits—Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, a Southern congressman flanked by Klansmen, a goat as a satanic orchestrator—around an implied witness seat, making the viewer feel interrogated. Levine draws on his WPA/social-realist roots and techniques from old masters and German Expressionism, using dense, viscous paint and collapsing spatial and temporal cues to produce a claustrophobic, machine-like chorus of malevolence. The work references Levine’s personal encounters with anti-Communist scrutiny and reclaims narrative history at a monumental scale.

Original Description

Jack Levine, Witches' Sabbath, 1963, oil on canvas, 243.8 x 213.4 cm (Art Bridges Foundation) © Estate of Jack Levine

speakers: Ibby Ouweleen, Curatorial Associate, Art Bridges Foundation and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory