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An example of work by Jack Beal
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  An abstract expressionist and figurative painter, Jack Beal was born in
Richmond, Virginia in 1931. As a young child he was often ill
with ear infections and to take his mind off the pain his mother
encouraged him to draw. Although his drawing talent set him apart
from his peers, Beal might never have become an artist if a professor
at the College of William and Mary had not changed his life by telling
him to leave school and go to The Art Institute of Chicago. Beal
followed this advice, studying for three years at The School of the Art
Institute, where he learned to paint in the Abstract Expressionist
style.
Eventually Beal began to move toward figuration in his
work and is now considered "a realist's realist." "The trouble is," he
says, "I have never been able to achieve the level of naturalism I
would like."
His heroes in the realm of realism are the 17th-century Dutch painters.
"They seem to have painted just as naturally as we eat or drink. There
is a quality of believability in those paintings." Beal also greatly
admires Renaissance art.
Beal taught at Cooper Union for a semester and quit. He also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, but he disliked both experiences. He and his wife have, in a sense, opened an art institute of their own. They have no children but "plenty of surrogate sons and daughters" in the promising young realist artists they take in and teach, both at their New York studio and at their upstate farm in Oneonta, New York.
Sources include:
Web-site of Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska.
Gerrit Henry in Art News, December 1984.
Additional information provided by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
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Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| Jack Beal was born in 1931 in Richmond, Virginia. He attended the
Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary from 1950 to
1953. Between 1953 and 1956, he studied art history at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with Kathleen Blackshear.
Beal was inspired by Blackshear, who taught the discipline of art
history "as art, rather than simply as art history, making us take art
apart and look at its component pieces…"(1)
He studied painting with Isobel Steele MacKinnon, who was an even more
important influence. A painter of Scottish descent, MacKinnon was
a student of the German Expressionist Hans Hoffmann between 1925 and
1929. Beal's fellow students at the SAIC included Red Grooms,
Richard Estes, John Chamberlain and Claes Oldenburg.
In addition to his studies at the Art Institute, Beal attended classes
at the University of Chicago between 1955 and 1956. While at the
SAIC, MacKinnon and others schooled Beal and his classmates in the
basics of pictorial space and other instructors taught the tenets of
Abstract Expressionism. They were encouraged to follow in the
footsteps of Willem de Kooning and others, painting organically
conceived, abstract compositions with passionate, lively strokes of the
brush.
In 1955 Beal married fellow student (and sculptor) Sondra
Freckelton. The couple moved to a loft in lower Manhattan the
following year where they became acquainted with members of the "New
York School" of Abstract Expressionists. Beal continued to work in that
style for five more years, but eventually concluded that his passion
for art reached beyond abstraction. He recently told George Adams
"I didn't want to be a second or third generation anything" (2)
Beal had been exposed to the work of the Old Masters at the SAIC and
always had an affinity for the work of Velásquez. (3) As he told Adams,
"I asked myself: 'If you love Velásquez so much, why don't you try to
paint like him, with all the complexity and passion of the masters?' I
wanted to paint like Velásquez—not de Kooning-does-Velásquez—but
Velásquez… Alfred Leslie once said that he wanted to put back into art
everything that modernism had taken out. That was how I felt, too." (4)
By1963, Beal and a handful of his peers began to abandon Abstract
Expressionism. They developed a form of realist, narrative painting
unlike the representational styles previously seen in American art.
They made drawings and paintings from direct observation, but remained
sensitive to the organic structure of the composition, continuing to
make use of the fluid brushstrokes they developed as Abstract
Expressionists. Eric Shanes notes that during this period Beal
became increasingly "accurate" in his description of objects, eschewing
"the somewhat expressionistic depiction of forms and subjective
emotional intensity of his earlier painting…"(5)
Like other so-called "new realists," Beal gradually withdrew from
applying a broad, expressive brushstroke. The edges of the
figures and objects in his paintings became more tightly defined.
He departed from the more ambiguous and complex "light" of his
expressionist paintings and began rendering his forms in an
uni-directional light, complimented by cast shadows. Like the
15th-century Italian artist Masaccio, Beal's work profoundly departed
from that of the previous generation by breaking away from the flatness
of abstraction. Instead, his directed light reveals the forms in
his paintings more sculpturally and in three dimensions.
Beal has been awarded several major commissions during his career,
including a series of four murals he completed on the history of
American labor for the General Services Administration at the
Department of Labor Building in Washington, D.C. These paintings
portrayed what Barbara Cavaliere refers to as "monumental statements of
a sweeping moral nature which have earned Beal the position of being
called the most prominent Social Realist since the 1930s
generation."(6)
He has been a visiting lecturer at over 100 schools, universities and
museums throughout the country. Among the many public and private
collections of art that include his paintings, Jack Beal's work can be
found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art
and Museum of Modern Art.
Sources:
1. Jack Beal, from an interview quoted in Eric Shanes Jack Beal (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1993), 13.
2. George Adams, "Interview with Jack Beal," from Les Reker and George Adams, Abstract Expressionism and the New American Realism: Paintings by Jack Beal and Philip Pearlstein
(Columbus, GA: Columbus Museum, 1999), 19. George Adams purchased his
New York gallery and was able to retain many of the artists from Allan
Frumkin. It was in Chicago at Frumkin’s Superior Street Gallery
where Beal first saw the work of many of the "first generation"
Abstract Expressionists.
3. Diego Velásquez (1599-1660) was one of the great masters of the
Baroque age and thought to be the finest painter Spain ever
produced. A court painter to King Philip IV, Velásquez painted
large, complex, salon-style narratives with many figures, masterfully
composed with brilliant color and bravura brushwork. More a
classicist than a Baroque artist, Velásquez became a model for many
realist painters in subsequent years.
4. George Adams, "Interview with Jack Beal." This information is derived from Les Reker and George Adams, Abstract Expressionism and the New American Realism: Paintings by Jack Beal and Philip Pearlstein (Columbus, GA: Columbus Museum, 1999), 19.
5. Shanes, 22.
6. Barbara Cavaliere, "Jack Beal,” Contemporary Artists (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), 75.
Submitted by the staff, Columbus Museum |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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