Jack Boul | February 8, 1927 – November 8, 2024
Washington DC artist Jack Boul passed away surrounded by peace at his home on November 8. His family was by his bedside. He was 97.
Remarkably, he was painting almost to the very end. The day before he died, he used his fingers as a brush to draw figures in the air.
Jack Boul was an oil painter, a print maker, a sculptor, a framer, a teacher, a World War II veteran, a champion for justice, a mentor, a father, a grandfather, and an extraordinarily devoted husband. His wife (and muse) of 72 years, Vivian Boul, passed away four years ago. Jack never fully recovered from that loss.
He was a man of varied talents. He built his own art studio at his house – twice. He crafted a three-string dulcimer that hung in his bedroom. He sang Gershwin songs to his grandchildren. He could speak Yiddish – but also did a spot-on imitation of Donald Duck.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927 and raised in the South Bronx near the Willis Avenue Bridge, he lived in a rough part of the city. He was fond of recalling that his neighborhood not only had a bar on every corner – it also had one in the middle of each block.
His parents owned a grocery store where he worked. Later, he toiled as a longshoreman on the New York docks.
Jack and Vivian first met while working in Upstate New York at the Jewish Camp Kinderland, known as a “progressive summer camp with a conscience.” Their marriage lasted 72 years. It was a profound love.
Jack Boul attended the American Artist’s school in New York before being drafted into the military. In 1945, he served with the US occupational forces near Pisa, Italy and was stationed at a POW camp housing high-ranking German officers.
During his US Army service, he was given copies of official government photographs that documented the Nazi atrocities. After showing these pictures to the inmates, German soldiers denied their authenticity.
“You have your propaganda and we have ours,” the prisoners told Jack.
That incident, forever burned in Jack’s memory, prompted him to create a graphic and stark series of 17 monotypes depicting the bodies of Holocaust victims. The series was later donated to the Holocaust Museum LA.
After the war, Jack and Vivian moved to Seattle where he studied at the Cornish School of Art. They then moved to Washington DC where he studied and then taught for many years at American University.
As an artist, Jack Boul had a strong predilection for landscape. His favorite subjects included black and white cows, the C&O Canal, quiet interiors, the human figure, as well as urban motifs.
“Jack Boul repeatedly returns to favorite subjects, often over a long period of time, to explore the expressive possibilities of a theme,” wrote Dr. Eric Denker, the curator and writer who was perhaps Boul’s greatest champion.
“His paintings and monotypes reveal the underlying structure of the world around us,” wrote Denker, the senior lecturer emeritus at the National Gallery of Art. “Boul creates intimate works of balance and harmony, images of surpassing beauty drawn from the fabric of everyday life.”
Jack Boul’s work is included in many public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian, the Phillips Collection, the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Museums of Fine Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the art collection of the Federal Reserve Bank. His oil paintings and monotypes are also included in hundreds of private collections – including those of many former students.
In 2021, two of Jack Boul’s works were added to the Maryland State Art Collection. One of the paintings, “Maryland Landscape” was placed in the Drawing Room on the first floor of the governor’s mansion.
Jack Boul exhibited his poetic oil paintings, monotypes and sculpture widely — including shows at the Corcoran Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Mint Museum, American University’s Katzen Museum, the Franz Bader Gallery, the Jefferson Place Gallery, and Stanford University’s Art Gallery in Washington DC.
In 2022, the works of Jack Boul were exhibited in Paris at the Salle Paul Rosenberg, the legendary gallery of the art dealer of Picasso.
His most recent exhibition was held earlier this year at New York’s historic Salmagundi Club.
In a review of his retrospective at the Corcoran Museum of Art, the longtime Washington Post art critic, Paul Richard, wrote:
“Boul is excellent at benign glimpses. His subjects are as unthreatening as a stroll in the country or a visit to the Phillips. He sees an empty wheelbarrow bright in the back yard, glowing in the sunshine of a summer afternoon, and in a few strokes captures the essence of that vision. His monotype technique evokes Edgar Degas’. The modernists of Paris liked to walk through neighborhoods and record the quotidian. Boul sees a bald man in a barbershop getting a haircut, and, through a flurry of his dispersed markings, so do we. He sees a couple dining in Baltimore at Haussner’s, or his wife reading the newspaper in the living room, or cows. Nice bucolic cows. The man makes pleasant pictures.”
Boul taught painting and drawing in the Washington area from the 1950’s through the 1990’s and was known as a soft spoken but firm instructor who challenged his students. One former student, Joe Kossow, noted that Boul took a simple yet direct approach, helping his pupils refine what they were interested in, and then gently pointing out ways to strengthen their compositions.
Over the years, his classes were held at many varied institutions including the Smithsonian, the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy, the Chestnut Lodge psychiatric institution, and American University, where he was on the faculty for 15 years. Later, he was among the founding members of the Washington Studio School.
He once described his core philosophy for creating art:
“I am interested in the first impression, the distant impression one gets looking at things with your eye half open. The gesture of things, how they lean, or stand, or sit. I am interested in color before it becomes a rendered thing. How do you enter a painting, move around in its space, turn the corners?
I like thick paint, and thin paint
I like dry paint, and wet paint
I like hard edges, and soft edges
Sometimes I can put them all together
When I do, I am happy for a little while.”
He is survived by his daughter, Nina and son-in-law Alex Rasch, his son David Boul and son-in-law Tom O’Briant, and his grandchildren, Sarah and Alexander Rasch.
During a career that spanned more than 75 years, Jack Boul created hundreds of oil paintings and monotypes. He worked on his last oil painting for many, many months. It featured Vivian in a garden. His grieving prevented him from finishing that piece.
A portion of his work will be donated to the Jack Boul Collection at the American University where it will continue to be exhibited and studied.
Gifts may be made in memory of Jack Boul to that project at the American University Museum, online at: go.american.edu/JackBoul