Estate of Jack Beal
During November and December the George Adams Gallery will present an exhibition of paintings by Jack Beal surveying his career spanning the past five decades. The exhibition includes 21 paintings ranging in date from 1962 to 2011.
Notable in the exhibition is one of his earliest and most expressionistic paintings, “Still-life with Anemones“ from 1962, and an early example from his series of paintings of his wife, Sondra Freckelton seen through a trompe l’oeil frame that was featured on the announcement card of his first exhibition at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in 1965. Also included in the exhibition is the study for Beal’s Times Square MTA mural “The Return of Spring,” 1997, as well as a wall of self-portraits, including his last, made between 1982 and 2011.
Jack Beal began his association with the gallery (then the Allan Frumkin Gallery) in 1965 with his first of two one-man exhibitions that year. He exhibited regularly with the gallery in New York for the next 20 years during which time he established himself as a leader of figurative artists (a group that included Alfred Leslie and Philip Pearlstein, who were also affiliated with the gallery) who re-invigorated the tradition of American Realism.
Beal was a founder of the Artist’s Choice Museum (1976), the New York Academy of Art (1982), and the La Napoule Art Foundation (1984). In 1977 he completed “The History of Labor,” a series of four 12’x13’ murals commissioned for the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., and in 2001 and 2005 he completed two 20’ long mosaic murals commissioned by New York MTA for the Times Square IRT subway station.
Jack Beal was the subject of three museum retrospective exhibitions as well as a monograph by Eric Shanes, and was awarded honorary degrees by the Art Institute of Boston, Hollins College, and the State University of New York, Oneonta. His work is represented in the collections of museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.