JOE JONES (1909-1963)
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Biography • Joe Jones (1909-1963)
Joe Jones was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1909. He enrolled in evening art classes at the St. Louis Art School while working for his father who was a house painter. His first studio was located in the back of the Mathes Shoe Store on South Broadway. Jones’s first one-man show was organized in the dance studio of Madame Ebers Hoops. It attracted the patronage of Horace Swope, a board member of the St. Louis Art Museum and the museum’s director, Meyric Rogers. In 1933 Robert Elman, a surgeon, and a group of ten business men formed the Joe Jones Club. The members of the club gave Joe Jones a modest weekly stipend and in return, each sponsor was allowed to keep one painting. Joe Jones used some of the money to visit the art colony at Provincetown. When Jones returned to St. Louis, he executed American Justice, which was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum, and Midwestern Landscape, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. Through the Public Works Art Project, Jones executed a mural for the St. Louis City Hospital. Jones conducted an art class for the unemployed every Tuesday and Friday as part of his personal social uplift effort. The class project was a mural called Social Unrest in St. Louis, designed by Joe Jones and executed by his students.
In 1934 Jones made trips around Missouri to develop ideas for Map of Missouri, his entry for the State Capitol mural commission competition. Jones photographed farmers and historical sights to create this highly detailed painting with references to Missouri’s history, including the Pony Express, the death of Jesse James, Indian raids on early settlers, the singer Jenny Lynn’s famous tour of the state, Lindberg’s plane Spirit of Saint Louis, as well as literary icon Mark Twain. Objects of state pride included were the Saint Louis Art Museum, the State Capitol Building in Jefferson City, the Saint Louis Zoo, and art schools taught by Thomas Hart Benton and Joe Jones. Benton won the mural commission, but Jones’s masterful painting is an innovative salute to Missouri’s fertility, productivity, enterprise, and diverse history.
In 1934 Jones exhibited Wheat in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. Its critical success led Jones to paint a famous series of wheat subjects from 1935 into the 1940s. Jones’s main aesthetic interest in the wheat field was the beautiful rhythm farmers achieved in their work and their obvious enjoyment in this achievement. The artist saw fulfillment in one’s work as a kind of spiritual beauty worth recording in his paintings. The wheat paintings celebrating the American farmer led Jones to be awarded sought-after mural commissions in the U.S. Post Offices of Magnolia, Arkansas (Threshing, 1938); Charleston, Missouri (Harvest, 1939); Anthony, Kansas (Turning a Corner, 1939); Seneca, Kansas (Men and Wheat, 1940); and Dexter, Missouri (Husking Corn, 1941). In 1935 Jones painted a mural for the Commons Building of Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, and entered Apple Tree and Wheat in an exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum. An extensive set of murals, executed in 1937 and titled The Story of Grain, were commissioned by Morris Maltin for a downtown St. Louis restaurant and bar at 905 North 12th Street. In 1937 the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Threshing. The Encyclopaedia Britannica also purchased one of Jones’s wheat pictures titled Wheat Farmers which appeared in the 1945 catalogue of their collection, Contemporary American Painting. In 1943, one of Jones’s final wheat subjects, Yellow Grain, was purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Joe Jones achieved such great success in his 1935 one-man exhibition at Herman Baron’s ACA Galleries, he was featured in an article in Time magazine. In 1936, Jones started a summer art school in Saint Geneviere, Missouri, with both Thomas Hart Benton and James Turnbull as visiting faculty members. In March of 1937, Jones won a Guggenheim Fellowship. In October of 1937, Jones had another one-man show at ACA Galleries in New York. In 1939, Jones exhibited at the New York World’s Fair, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, and at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, CA.
Throughout his life, Jones maintained a studio in St. Louis and used it whenever he worked on large-scale mural commissions, although he lived in Croton-on-Hudson since 1942. Jones won the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Gold Medal and designed war posters with Thomas Hart Benton during the war. From 1940 to 1945, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Associated American Artists of New York contracted sixteen artists, including Benton and Jones, to go into the field and record the role of the oil industry in the war effort. Jones executed twelve paintings featuring the company’s oil well in Elk Basin, a large oil field which lies across the border of Montana and Wyoming. During the 1940s Joe Jones received other important commissions for Abbott Laboratories, American Tobacco Company, and the Niagara Alkalis Company. The Gimble Art Collection of Pennsylvania purchased Jones’s views of the Pittsburgh river front and the harbor of Philadelphia, which were executed on a year-long project sponsored by Associated American Artists. Jones became a war correspondent for Life magazine, documenting war preparation in Alaska. After the war, Jones went to Labrador to report on iron ore explorations for Fortune magazine. Throughout the 1950s, Jones continued to execute works and exhibit through Associated American Artists. He died in Morristown, New Jersey in 1963.