Jack Beal
American, born 1931
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.
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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.
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