‘Jack’ Maul,
painter
and writer
KATHLEEN ALLEN Assistant Features Editor
John C. ”Jack” Maul, whose paintings, writings and energies helped mark the ”early modern art” period in Tucson during the ’50s, died of cancer last week at his Nogales home. He was 80.
Services are slated for Wednesday in Nogales.
”Jack was one of the great artists of his time in this area,” said Maurice Grossman, a retired University of Arizona art professor and co-curator of ”Tucson’s Early Moderns,” a UA Museum of Art exhibit shown earlier this year. The show included some of Mr. Maul’s abstract paintings.
”He was an experimenter,” continued Grossman. ”His art was on the edge all the time. He was always experimenting with new forms, new ideas. He was always searching.”
Mr. Maul, who received his fine arts degree from the UA, grew up in Nogales, but spent much of his life in Tucson painting, writing (he was the Tucson Citizen’s art critic for a few years in the ’50s), and pouring his energy into Ash Alley, a small downtown back street that burst with art galleries and life during the ’50s.
”His articles were really from the heart,” Grossman recalled of Mr. Maul’s art reviews. ”This man just had real insight about the artists he wrote about. I still have copies – they were so well written they were keepers.”
Artist Harold Friedly remembers when he moved to Tucson in 1949, Mr. Maul was one of the first people he met.
”My first impression was here is a gregarious person with a great sense of humor,” said Friedly, whose work was also featured in the UAMA show. ”He was very positive, and you could talk to him about everything. He was a very unique person.”
Lifelong Nogales resident Fannie Courtland, who attended grade school with Mr. Maul, remembers his eclectic interests and keen eye.
”He had a great sense of aesthetics,” she said. ”His sense of balance and color and symmetry were the driving force of his life. His knowledge of literature and music was tremendous, but above all, he knew art. He had strong, strong opinions, based on a profound history of art and its development. He was an artist through and through.”
Services for Mr. Maul will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Adair’s Carroon Mortuary Chapel, at 1191 N. Grand Ave. in Nogales. A reception at Hilltop Gallery, 730 Hilltop Drive, immediately follows the service.
The family requests that contributions in his memory be made to the Tucson Museum of Art, or to a charity of your choice.