Joe Jones (artist)
| Joe Jones | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Joseph John Jones April 7, 1909 St. Louis, Missouri |
| Died | 1963 Morristown, New Jersey |
| Nationality | American |
Joseph John Jones (1909–1963) was an American painter, landscape painter, lithographer, and muralist. TIME magazine followed him throughout his career. Although Jones was never a member of the John Reed Club, his name is closely associated with its artistic members, most of them also contributors to the New Masses magazine.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, April 7, 1909. Self-taught, he quit school at age fifteen to work as a house painter, his father's profession.
Father of Peter Jones, Timothy Jones, Katie Jones Allen and Reverend James Jones. Grandfather of Lobbyist Jonathon Jones, Susannah Hooker, Brooke Jones, Jodi Jones Miller, Allison Jones Arcangel, Stephanie Jones, Timothy J. Jones, Kasey Errico, Jennifer Allen Flynn, Elizabeth Grace Jones Knier and Katharine Jones. Great Grandfather of Wells, Lawton, and Olivia Jones, Mariah and Christopher Miller, Jonathan and Nicholas Arcangel, and Daniel and Kalli Errico.
Jones worked in his native St. Louis, Missouri, until age 27, then spent the rest of his life based in or around New York City.
Jones' experiments in painting won him a series of prizes at the St. Louis Art Guild exhibitions. Following these came a commission to paint a mural at the KMOX radio station and a solo exhibition by the guild.
In 1933, ten patrons led by Elizabeth Green in St. Louis formed a "Joe Jones Club" and financed his travel to the artists' colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. While some critics have considered his early paintings as typical of the Midwestern Regionalist style exemplified by the work of Thomas Hart Benton, others have stated that he was in fact "anti-Regionalist." By then, Jones had only from magazines; art historian Andrew Hemingway surmises that Jones absorbed Modernist and Cubist ideas also from paintings. Upon his return to St. Louis, Jones lived in a houseboat.
In August 1935, Jones painted a mural series at the Commonwealth College at Mena, Arkansas. Mr. Jones painted a New Deal mural for the post office in Charleston, MO titled Harvest in 1938. This mural was done at the height of Jones' fame and is a classic subject for Mr. Jones. It depicts the harvest of wheat in a very labor-intensive manner showing the cutting, gathering, and stacking of it onto a wagon. Under a cloudy dark sky, wheat dominates the perspective with the farmers providing a great deal of motion. Another New Deal mural entitled Men & Wheat was painted by Joe Jones in 1940 followed by Husking Corn in 1941 for the Dexter, Missouri post office,Turning a Corner in 1939 in Anthony, Kansas and Threshing in Magnolia, Arkansas in 1938. All the murals depicted some process during a wheat harvest. Of the "revolutionary element" his early work, Jones wrote to Green, it is "not warped to bias to any party" except for the "militant struggle of the working class," which he contrasted to artists who believed in the Communist Party.
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