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for JOE JONES
JOE JONES
1909-1963
CountrySt. Louis, Missouri, USA
BiographyJoe Jones was born in St. Louis Missouri in 1909. He worked as a house painter and was completely self-taught. He attracted national attention with his first New York showing at the A.C.A. Gallery in the spring of 1935. In reviewing this exhibition, Archibald MacLeish said of him, "he pretty much stole the season. . . not by any flukes of startling specialties but because he generally impressed critics and the habitual treaders of gallery water as having fully digested a lot of good ideas and a lot of good people, and as having more scope, more vitality, more fecundity, and more promise as well as more mastery than most artists a decade his senior." Jones did not remain in New York City to bask in the sunshine of this "heart-warming success" but retired once more to his homeland, convinced that further artistic growth could not come from "intellectual concepts" but in intimate, personal contact with the soil in which his art is so deeply rooted. He worked in the wheat fields with farmers as one of them and recreated his experience in paint. A year later he exhibited again in New York City, this time at the Walker Galleries. And on the occasion Lewis Munford wrote in "The New Yorker," "Jones can draw and he a sense of land and crop and cloud that is full of feeling expressed in the surest and tenderest touches, particularly in the sky. He has been called a proletarian painter and propagandist painter. Perhaps he is. But he is closer to Whitman than to Marx." In his lithograph, "Wastelands," he has caught the tragic grandeur of the Dust Bowl. There is the magnificent play of sky pattern against land pattern. Both patterns arise in response to the action of the wind. The wind, as it were, is the artist creating beauty in the sky and destruction of the land. It sweeps through the picture in mighty gusts of desolation, burying the impermanent works of man deep in the sands of a ravaged soil, and returns to the eternal skies. Information taken from the artist's binder in The Print Study Room.
Entered by: Michael Clayton, Print Study Room Staff, 2/7/06
Person TypeIndividual