Creativity Quote by Jack Levine

Rugged individualism is the artist's favorite origin story: one lone genius, unbothered, unbought, untouched by the crowd. Jack Levine punctures that self-myth with a simple, sly turn of phrase: “like to think.” The line doesn’t accuse artists of fraud so much as reveal a craving for a certain kind of moral glamour. Independence becomes a brand, a pose you can wear even while you’re chasing gallery approval, grants, patrons, critics, and the invisible committee called “taste.”

Levine knew this from the inside. A Jewish painter from Boston who made his name with satirical, socially charged scenes, he watched art markets, politics, and institutions shape what gets seen and what gets rewarded. In his era - the mid-century rise of Abstract Expressionism, the boom of New York as an art capital - the mythology of the solitary, heroic creator became especially profitable. The “independent character” wasn’t just a personality type; it was a selling point, a way to convert authenticity into cultural capital.

The subtext is not that artists lack individuality, but that individuality is never pure. Artists borrow, react, compete, network, and internalize their moment even when they claim to transcend it. Levine’s sentence is doing social critique with a light touch: he’s inviting artists to notice how much of their supposed outsider status is actually a carefully maintained insider performance. The sting lands because it targets vanity, not technique - and because it’s hard to deny while you’re still insisting you’re the exception.