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A major twentieth century painter and printmaker, Joe Jones was almost
entirely self-taught. He began exhibiting his paintings and prints around
St. Louis in the late 1920’s. He also organized and taught art classes for
children of unemployed workers in 1934. At about this time Jones became a
member of the Communist party and a leading political activist throughout
the decade of the Depression. His views were, of course, greatly criticized
by mid-western conservatives and thus Jones left St. Louis for New York in
1935.
Many of Jones’s paintings and prints from this era (including five large
murals) were commissioned by the government supported Works Progress
Administration. Also, in 1937, he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim
Foundation Fellowship and his art was included in important exhibitions at
the Carnegie Institute. In World War Two, Jones worked as a war artist for
Life Magazine.
During his career, Joe Jones’s art underwent significant changes. His early
paintings and prints (many depicting laborers and farm workers) were at the
forefront of both Social Realism and American Regionalism. Until the end of
the Second World War the large majority of Jones’s prints were in the medium
of lithography. Jones made his first experiments in the medium of the colour
silk-screen in 1945. After that date he devoted much of his talents to this
form of art. The possibility within the silk-screen of creating large prints
with full ranges of colours and tonal values contributed to a transformation
of Jones’s art. Moving more towards a lyrical almost calligraphic form of
abstractionism, Jones brilliantly explored the relationships of line, form
and colour. His silk-screens from the post war era, such as this original
example, are now seen as masterworks of their time.
Prominent galleries that today include the art of Joe Jones in their
collections are the Smithsonian Institute, the White House, the San Diego
Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the
Carnegie Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art and the Whitney
Museum, New York.
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