Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"Obituary by ELLEN ROBERTSON Richmond Va. Times-Dispatch, 9/11/2013
Abstract expressionism was the popular art style in the 1960s, but that didn’t stop Richmond-born artist Jack Beal from wanting more form in his paintings.
On one of his summer painting jaunts in the New York countryside during the early 1960s, “he found himself painting an enormous 7-foot canvas,” said his wife and fellow artist Sondra Freckelton. “It was very loose, but very recognizable as houses and streams.
“Smitten” with painting from nature, he painted one 7-foot canvas per day for the rest of that summer, she said.
Walter Henry “Jack” Beal Jr., whose mature work helped define a resurgence of realism in painting known as the New Realism during the 1960s and 1970s, died of kidney failure Aug. 29 in an Oneonta, N.Y. hospital. He was 82.
His works hang in halls ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art to the National Portrait Gallery and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art — and the New York subway.
Hundreds of people walk past his two best-known public works each day.
He and five assistants spent three years painting a series of four huge murals titled “The History of Labor” that the U.S. Department of Labor installed in 1977 in its Washington headquarters. The murals depict four centuries of Americans working together to build their nation. Loving to “paint from life,” he enlisted friends and total strangers — who became his friends — in creating mural people ranging from Colonial pioneers to telephone linesmen. He painted himself in several murals, too.
New York Times critic Hilton Kramer wrote at the time that the murals, whose effect he called “breathtaking,” established Mr. Beal as “the most important social realist to have emerged in American painting since the 1930s.”
During the late 1990s, Mr. Beal created two large glass-tile mosaic panels for the New York subway depicting the Greek myth of Persephone and how she brought about the changing of the seasons.
Other works came as subjects interested him: nudes; subjects such as virtues and vices done in new ways, as in modern dress; depictions of the physical senses; and mythological subjects. “He liked doing things that were ordinary in a very unordinary way,” Freckelton said.
Mr. Beal never rejected the abstract style he learned in school, but combined it with realism, especially in composing his paintings, his wife said.
“Dynamic composition was really his thing. There was strong spatial design to his work. He didn’t believe in the flat style that was popular. He said it didn’t leave room for life. He wanted to invite you into his paintings,” his wife said.
Born June 25, 1931, in Richmond, he was often beset by ear infections and his mother encouraged him to draw to distract him. When he was 13, his father died, and he spent time in the Richmond Home for Boys, where he defended himself from bullies by drawing pictures that he gave them.
A teacher who saw his artwork while he studied biology, anatomy and art at the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary, now Old Dominion University, encouraged him to leave college and go to art school. From 1953 to 1956, he studied at The Art Institute of Chicago, where he met his wife, before leaving for the New York art scene.
The couple moved in 1973 to an old mill in Franklin, N.Y. He loved fly-fishing in the stream near his home, formula-car racing during the 1960s and entertaining in his garden.
Mr. Beal loved new artists and “stoking the spark and passion of the artist in young people” through artist-in-residence and other programs around the country, his wife said. “I think he would have paid to teach.”
In a 1996 student newspaper interview, Mr. Beal called his three artist-in-residence and faculty fellow experiences at Hollins University in Roanoke during the 1990s “one of the best things that ever happened to us.” Hollins bestowed honorary doctorates on both Beals.
A memorial visitation will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday at Lester R. Grummons Funeral Home in Oneonta, followed by a celebration of his life at 5 p.m. at his home in Franklin, N.Y.
Another memorial service will be Nov. 2 at George Adams Gallery in New York, where there will be an exhibition of his work."