A beloved member of the American University community, Jack Boul (1927—2024), who passed away at the age of 97 on November 8, is remembered as a distinguished artist and dedicated professor.  

Boul’s artistic career spanned 75 years and multiple mediums, including oil painting, printmaking, sculpture, and framing. He produced hundreds of works throughout his lifetime. Boul’s final project was an oil painting in memory of his late wife Vivian Boul who passed in 2020.  

In his career, Boul was regarded for elevating quotidian scenes and landscapes through his signature grace of craft.  

He gravitated toward essence over accuracy, his works conveying an intimacy of a world observed. Among his most favored and repeated subjects were black and white cows, interiors, human figures, and the local C&O Canal.  

Today, Boul’s oil paintings and monotypes are included in public collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Phillips Collection, the Library of Congress, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others, as well as in the private collections of many former students. 

Boul’s legacy holds particular meaning for the AU Museum and greater Washington, DC, artistic community.  

As a professor in AU’s Department of Art and a leading voice within the city’s art scene, Boul instilled in his students an appreciation of shape and color. His early tenure at AU furthered the art department’s longstanding relationship with the Phillips Collection—known as America’s first museum of modern art—and encouraged a creative sensibility rooted in perception that transcended styles. 

The most recent exhibition of Boul’s work at the AU Museum, aptly titled Perceptual Painting, shone a spotlight on this observational approach. Ahead of the exhibition’s run from June through August 2024, AU Museum C. Nicholas Keating and Carleen B. Keating Director and Curator Jack Rasmussen, CAS/MFA ’75, MA ’83, PhD ’94, referenced the lessons he learned as a student in Boul’s classes at AU. 

“We started with visible data, and then he encouraged us to paint our own perceptions,” Rasmussen recalled.  

Boul was committed to seeing the future of art—and artists—flourish across Washington, DC. He was among the founding members of the Washington Studio School and was affectionately known as the “dean of Washington printmakers” for his painterly monotypes.  

Speaking on Boul’s passing, Rasmussen described the artist’s legacy as one made alive through the generations of artists he taught.   

“Jack’s lasting impact will be the students who he worked with,” said Rasmussen. “There are a lot of artists in the Washington region who owe their start to his teaching and who are now teachers in their own right.” 

Boul’s work will continue to inspire young artists and historians at AU through the Jack Boul Collection. The AU Museum will be home to over 150 pieces of Boul's work through the generosity of the Boul Family, and an associated fund will ensure further exhibitions and close study. 

“Jack's influence as an artist was perhaps only matched by the influence on the lives he touched as an educator,” said College of Arts and Sciences Assistant Dean of Development Michael Scott. “The generosity of the Boul Family ensures the American University Art Museum will remain the proud home to Jack's legacy; a legacy that generations of students will continue to learn about as they prepare to become the leaders of the arts world of tomorrow, here in the nation's cultural capital.” 

For the AU students who will come to know Boul through his works, engaging with the collection is a way to pay homage to the stylistic lineage surrounding them. The influence of perceptual painting and graphic printmaking—largely due to Boul and the community of colleagues he cultivated—is an extraordinary timestamp in the history of the AU art department.  

Through the Jack Boul Collection, students now have a unique opportunity to learn about these distinctive styles firsthand. And like Boul, they too will come to hone their creative voices within their AU and local communities.  

Gifts can be made online in Boul’s memory to the Jack Boul Collection Fund.