The Influential Years

I am going to relate how I believe Lester’s career developed, why it took the course that it did. There is a certain quality of inevitability in terms of this development.

His mother was an artist (untrained, to be sure, but not without talent.) His father, adventuresome and explorative liked the challenge of a difficult problem. Cramped though their home might be, there was always room made available for Lester’s creative activities. He was always encouraged to use his hands and has recalled the fascination of assembling his own wireless set, to which he added that of “ham” operator, his call letters being 9DDQ. Prior to receiving his operator’s license, in 1919 or 1920, he had constructed a number of receiving sets both crystal and tube.

During these formative years the type of training he received contributed to the manner in which he worked. In high school at Lane Technical School he had been engaged in considerable work with his hands. Of particular import was four years of mechanical drawing.

All through his boyhood years and later at the University of Chicago he found himself drawn into artistic activities, finally graduating from the University with a Ph.B. in History of Art in 1926. In these days traditional art was taught, none of the movements such as Impressionism being a part of the curriculum. His absorbing interest in the Fine Arts was now established. Within the next few years, although he was always vitally interested in art of the past, he became increasingly more interested in the art trends of the latter part of the 19th century and of his own time: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Dadaism, Surrealism, the Russian Constructivists, and the studies at the Bauhaus. He spent countless hours at the Ryerson Memorial Library at Chicago’s Art Institute.

To bring to life still more acutely the world of art which had been developing during these years, he had the great good fortune of meeting Fred Hauck, a most sensitive artist, of intellectually perceptive understanding. Fred had just returned from Munich, where he had studied under Hans Hoffman, bringing back with him books on the Bauhaus and on the progress of other art trends abroad. Some of the happiest occasions of Lester’s life were spent with the Haucks: Fred, and Janet, his wife (also a previous student of Hans Hoffman’s in Munich.) These conversations were from the heart, free yet analytical. These were perhaps two people altogether in his life with whom Lester could converse in this manner about art: Fred, and Joanna Beall Westermann, our daughter. Other members of the family were fortunate to be present on these occasions to sense the excitement of this thinking. He was far too reticent. His thoughts far too much a part of himself.

So, we have Lester Beall, the beginning of his career in progress. It was a time of discovering the interdependence of painting, sculpture, and the technique of modern industry and of the underlying unity of all creative work.