Jack Beal:
A Survey from 1963 to 1994

October 11 through December 20, 1998

This exhibition features thirteen works of American realist painter Jack Beal. Jack Beal is one of a group of artists who, coming out of the abstract expressionist movement, sought to re-introduce realism into the vocabulary of 20th century contemporary art. This group includes Phillip Pearlstein, James Valerio and Alfred Leslie.

Born June 25, 1931 in Richmond Virginia, Jack Beal was educated at the Norfolk Division of the College of William & Mary, now Old Dominion University. He later studied with Isobel Steele MacKinnon and Kathleen Blackshear at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and took supplementary courses at the University of Chigaco, where he studied with Paul Carroll.

In 1965 Beal presented the first one-person exhibition at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. In 1973 and 1981, he presented one-person exhibitions at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris.

In 1974 Beal was commissioned to make four murals for the new U.S.Department of Labor building in Washington, D.C. Other commissions include a portrait for Washington & Lee University's law school, and a mural commissioned by Times Square Subway Improvement Corporation for the Times Square subway station. The finished designs and drawings for the subway station are currently at the mosaicists in Italy.

Beal's works are found in public collections throughout the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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