Jack Beal was an American realist painter and printmaker who rejected the emotional intensity and gestural spontaneity of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the postwar era in favor of expressing the ideals of truth, beauty, and morality through more traditional pictorial representation. Beal’s subjects included portraits, nudes, still lifes, landscapes, narrative works, and large-scale murals depicting allegories and myths. Beal considered himself to be a “life painter” and stressed human concerns over aesthetics or theoretical approaches. His work helped define the New Realism movement of the 1960s, a school of figurative painting that included such artists as Al Leslie and Philip Pearlstein, among others.
