MADE IN MANCHESTER: THE ART OF EMMANUEL LEVY (1900-1986)

‘Emmanuel Levy is a Manchester man through and through,’ said Lord Ardwick of the painter whose 60-year career is telescoped through a bijou exhibition of 18 paintings and one drawing at the Manchester Jewish Museum. ‘But there is nothing provincial or distinctly English about his work. He is a citizen of the world.’

The paintings are hung in a back room of what was formerly the Sephardi (Spanish and Portuguese) synagogue belonging to the old Manchester of red brick, grey stone and Victorian stained glass. Levy would surely have approved: he was born in 1900 to Russian-Jewish émigrés, and his father was a beadle at the city’s Great Synagogue. He studied at the local art school, later earning a living as a portrait painter, art teacher, reviewer and playwright. At one of his classes he met his future wife, Ursula Leo, a refugee from Berlin, whose parents Levy helped escape Nazi Germany.

There is a painting in the exhibition of the beautiful Ursula, arms folded, staring out of her frame with green eyes. She sits in a long line of portraits that depict, in the main, ordinary people, some in straitened circumstances. These include The Neighbour’s Kid (1927) and Girl At Window (1935), where the meanness of life is conveyed in the young woman’s dour stare, tight pursed lips and clasped raw hands, as she sits wrapped up in the chilled daylight, the closed-up street behind her hopelessly empty.

In contrast, Levy was generous in his use of paint, applying it thickly to the canvas, giving his sitters a pleasing solidity, and tending towards the vibrancy of vermilion and viridian. There are occasional flashes of humour, as in Snow In the North (1960), where three stout, crabbed old women wearing winter coats and headscarves like armour cross the ice-bound road in front of them, stoic, garrulous, linked together like Three Fates in the North.

Described as being concerned with the mute tragedies of the humbler life, Levy also displays a fascination with Judaic ritual that has something of the bustle of Stanley Spencer’s Christian world and the angularity of David Bomberg’s compositions. In Two Rabbis Carrying The Scrolls Of The Law (1943) the joyous spirit of the festival of the Simchat Torah is captured in the strident, stripe-patterned parade of the two singing rabbis.

Photographs of Levy show a formal man who eschewed the work overall in favour of a single-breasted suit, shirt and tie, a cigarette sprouting from his lower lip as he faces his canvas, paint-encrusted palette clamped under his thumb. Overshadowed by his art-school contemporary LS Lowry, whose signature style became formulaic, Levy may have produced a less consistent body of work, but it is often bolder and more robust.

Until 29 May at Manchester Jewish Museum, Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester: 0161-834 9879, www.manchesterjewishmuseum.com