James "Jack" Wesley Boynton

James "Jack" Wesley Boynton, an artist, teacher and a key figure in the post-World War II Houston art scene, died Monday after a bout with lung cancer. He was 82.

Born in 1928 in Fort Worth, Boynton attended public schools in Fort Worth, Dallas and Houston, graduating from Lamar High School and earning bachelor's and master's degrees from Texas Christian University.

He began exhibiting his paintings in 1950 and moved to Houston to teach at the University of Houston in 1955. The same year, he won the Purchase Prize in the annual Texas exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and had a solo exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Museum.

"(Artist) Dick Wray used to say that in the '50s, if Dorothy Hood, Richard Stout, he and I had been riding in the same car and it had gotten hit, it would have wiped out art in Houston," Boynton told historian Sarah Reynolds in a 2006 interview. "There were not a lot of people (then) that were doing anything very avant garde, you know."

Boynton garnered national attention in the 1950s and 1960s for his modernist, largely abstract paintings, which MFAH curator Alison de Lima Greene described as "introspective, visionary landscapes." He was included in surveys of young American artists at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 1957, he was one of 17 artists to represent the United States at the Brussels World Fair.

After teaching at UH from 1955 to 1957, Boynton taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1960 to 1962, returning to Houston after his contract was completed. In 1969, he was instrumental in creating a studio art department at the University of St. Thomas, where he served as a professor until 1985.

While the 1950s and 1960s marked the height of his national fame, he exhibited in Houston and Fort Worth galleries throughout his career. In 1980, the Amarillo Art Center organized Jack Boynton: Retro/Spectrum, which traveled to museums in Tyler, Waco, Abilene and Beaumont. In 1989, TCU mounted Homecoming: A Thumbnail Retrospective, and in 2009 William Reaves Fine Art, a Houston gallery, presented Six Decades of Jack Boynton.

His work is owned by the MFAH, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and Guggenheim museums, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Amon Carter Museum and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.

Dr. James F. Boynton of Houston described his father as a quiet man who pursued his art for creative reasons and not for financial gain. "He didn't toot his own horn," the son said Monday.

Other survivors include his wife, Sharon Boynton; two daughters from a previous marriage, Betsy Boynton of St. Petersburg, Fla. and Amy Boynton-Sims of Vancouver, Wash.; and four grandchildren.

A Memorial Service will be held 3:00 p.m.Thursday, April 15, 2010 at Bethany Christian Church, 3223 Westheimer.