Giving Gingrich the Finger:

Strange but true: the best art about the current Republican primary was made two decades ago. 

Jack Levine, the irascible painterly leftist, started painting Finger of Newt back in 1993; the title, echoing the incantations of Macbeth’s witches, referred to the then-Speaker of the House. When I visited the artist in his Greenwich Village Studio in 1997, he was still obsessing over the best way to render Gingrich’s hand. “He’ll be out in two years and I won’t be done,” Levine growled.

Levine finally finished the picture in 1998, depicting the politician in a Capitol Hill setting (with a bust of Jefferson in the background and Bob Dole and Timothy McVeigh at his side). His pudgy middle digit lifted in the air, Gingrich is very clearly flipping the bird.

Levine passed away at the age of 95 in 2010—by which time, of course, the painting had become more relevant than ever. It’s for sale at New York’s DC Moore Gallery, along with other works by Levine, a one-time art star whose muckraking paintings became too earnest and insufficiently ironic for our postmodern moment.

Newt Gingrich’s comeback moment seems to be fading away. Could it finally be time for Jack Levine’s?

Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York.