Jack Boul

Jack Boul (February 8, 1927 – November 8, 2024) was an American artist and teacher based in Washington, D.C., whose oil paintings, monotypes and sculpture are included in museums including the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection.

His work has also been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art,

Background Boul was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 8, 1927 to Russian and Romanian parents and raised in the South Bronx. He attended the American Artists School in New York before serving in the United States Army.

Exhibitions

Boul exhibited in the Annual Area Exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1951 and again in 1954, 1956, and 1958. In 1957, he received his first solo exhibition at the Franz Bader Gallery attracting positive reviews that cited him as a promising young artist. In 1960, he had a one man show at the Watkins Gallery of Art at American University. Boul had his first museum exhibition in 1974 at the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1986, he was part of a two-person exhibition at the Mint Museum in Charlotte North Carolina with his friend, Pete DeAnna. That exhibition was later shown at the University of Maryland. in Venice, Italy, to Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland, and the Chestnut Lodge psychiatric institution in Rockville, Maryland.

In 2021, Maryland First Lady Yumi Hogan selected two of Jack Boul's works to add to the Maryland State Art Collection. One of the paintings, "Maryland Landscape" was placed in the governor's mansion's Drawing Room on the first floor.

Holocaust series of monotypes While serving in the US Army as a young soldier in Italy at the end of World War II, Boul has said he was profoundly affected by official government photos of the atrocities at Nazi concentration camps. Years later, he created a series of 17 monoprints depicting stark images of Holocaust victims. He has said it was important to memorialize this dark moment in history. Boul's Holocaust series was first exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2000. It was later donated to Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in 2008. “Jack Boul’s series is more than simply about the Holocaust as a pictorial record,” wrote Dr. Eric Denker, Senior Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “It transcends that, in the way that great art always transcends the immediacy of its subject…As with Kahlo, as with Goya, it’s an anti-war tract of great power."

Selected oil paintings

Selected monotypes