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Joe Jones might have needed the confines of St. Louis as much as he complained about them. Jones, a gifted painter and, for a time, a committed Communist, is the subject of a stunning retrospective at the Saint Louis Art Museum. He had an organic feel for St. Louis, says art historian M. Melissa Wolfe.

A conversation about Joe Jones' golden crimson period.

All images courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum, copyright heirs of Joe Jones

Joe Jones, Roustabouts, 1934; oil on canvas, 25 by 30 in., Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass.

It’s apt but too vague to say that Joe Jones, the American painter featured at the Saint Louis Art Museum through January 2, was a radical. By the early 1930s, Jones, born and reared in St. Louis, was as far left as you could be in that place and time: a capital “C” Communist. At the same time, his art—not coincidentally—explodes with color and verve. And then, like his politics, it seems to fade.

It also might not be incidental that Jones was in St. Louis in much of his golden period, which encompasses most of the 83 works in SLAM’s show “Joe Jones: Painter of the American Scene.”

Jones, who was born in 1909, seemed to have one foot in the Midwest throughout the ’30s. Then, from WWII until his death, in 1963, he’d remain near New York, closer to what was assumed to be the center of the art world and to the commercial opportunities he pursued. So it seems to be Jones’ frustration with the political and aesthetic values of St. Louis that’s the engine of his best work—his desire to épater le bourgeoisie, as the French Decadent poets cried: to shock the middle classes. To startle the horses. Jones seems to be proof that art, from Manet to the Modern Lovers, often thrives on limits.

If Jones’ post-war work was all we had, we wouldn’t and probably shouldn’t know of him at all today. As it is, the SLAM show, the first serious retrospective of his paintings and murals, is the first giant step toward re-establishing his reputation. It travels to Memphis after St. Louis, accompanied by a gorgeous catalog with color plates and essays by several curators and art historians, including “Joe Jones, Worker-Artist,” by M. Melissa Wolfe, curator of American art at Ohio’s Columbus Museum of Art.

We caught up with Wolfe by phone last week in Lake Tahoe, where she was attending a conference.

Joe Jones, View of St. Louis, c.1932; oil on canvas, 25.25 by 50.5 in., Saint Louis Art Museum

St. Louis Magazine: So what shall we call Joe Jones—was he an American Regionalist, like Thomas Hart Benton? He has the energy and dash that you see in some of Benton’s best work, but he’s so much more political than Benton was. Was he a Social Realist? He seems to be more formally joyous than what “Social Realism” conjures. He has some of that Modernist love of light and form…

M. Melissa Wolfe: You could say it’s the “art of social concern.” You know, starting with the Ashcan School, in New York at the turn of the century, it’s “paint what you know,” and that call for the everyday world, the working-class world, to be a legitimate subject for art, gets continued. It was not to stay in New York but to go back to the world you were from and to give it legitimacy as fine art. So artists went back and they painted what they saw. Well, when Jones comes along it’s the Depression, so a lot of what artists see is difficulties and inequalities and struggle.

Benton was originally a Modernist, so he comes out of an interest in formalism and the way in which two-dimensional space and three-dimensionality conflict. And Jones himself starts out as a Modernist—although he’s just looking at magazines, he hasn’t seen these paintings, or not many of them, maybe what’s at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Often we think of Regionalism and American Scene painters as these artists working away, isolated, but when you really look at them closely, you realize they’re drawing just as much on a Modernist tradition. They’re not that simple. The fact that they stay figurative and that they move out from the art centers has sort of marginalized them.

SLM: Jones seems like that rare bird, the true worker-artist. Unlike a lot of Communists in the U.S. in the ’30s, he’s not beginning as an intellectual who develops class consciousness. He’s self-taught, the son of a house painter, who leaves school at 14 to become a house painter himself.

MMW: He comes out of the proletariat. And he really struggles with that. And that’s why he was so exemplary: He was the worker artist. There was a call for people to stay in the working class and give voice to it. Most creative artists move up out of that world, they associate with that upper crust—that was the goal of artists, right? To be successful, to be in those big shows. And certainly that was the goal of Joe Jones. He’s really conflicted because he does come from the workers and he’s not an ideologue. His belief in the Communist Party was—I don’t want to say genuine, but it was very much as a worker. It’s an intuitive, working-class kind of thing.

Joe Jones, Industrial Landscape, 1932; oil on canvas, 20 by 28 in., collection of Michael Lawlor

SLM: When I first heard about this show, I looked at Jones’ work and was floored by it, by the beauty of it. And I’d never heard of him before. But it’s not just me, is it? Until now, it seems he’s been obscure, at least since the 1950s. Why is that?

MMW: When the American Scene artists were told “Go back where you’re from, paint what you know,” they did. And when you look at the images that Jones did of St. Louis and then ones he did once he moved to New York, there’s an organic feel for St. Louis. He just knows that city, there’s a rhythm to them, and an exuberance. There was a reason to go back to what you know. And it was fine during the ’30s because there was a network across the nation. You know, Grant Wood, who was a big name, was going off to jury some little tiny show in Canton, Ohio; there was a commitment, and this network that kept them all engaged and vibrant. New York knew about Joe Jones even though he was in St. Louis. But once that falls apart—it really falls apart with WW II and the movement of European artists to New York—they sort of get dropped out, and they continue to get dropped out now because their artworks aren’t all in New York, their archives aren’t in New York, their reputations aren’t there…

But now there’s a renewed interest in both figurative painting and in the art of the 1930s. That book [the show’s catalog, Joe Jones: Radical Painter of the American Scene] will get attention. It will be read by art historians all over.

Joe Jones, Threshing No. 1, 1935; oil on masonite, 35.25 by 47.25 in., private collection

SLM: So was Jones a major American artist? An important minor one?

MMW: I think he’s a major American Scene painter. I think he’s a major Social Realist. And as we look more and more at Social Realism and the ’30s, we look more and more at Communism and the nature of Communism in the ’30s. It was a different thing and it had a different feel. If you had incredible empathy, it was a really emotional choice: Something had to be done for those people. An artist like Joe Jones, what he’s seeing is that the Communist Party is leading these unemployed workers in St. Louis, they’re defending the Scottsboro boys. Jones wasn’t just a Social Realist, he was a Communist, and I think you can read his paintings that way…

If you’re going to talk about Social Realism or do an exhibition on Social Realism, you’ll now have to include Joe Jones. And now you’re going to include more than just one Joe Jones. And after this exhibition you’re going to read those wheat scenes with much more meaning—they’re about community. And just the glory of the landscape.

SLM: Even as he’s complaining that people in St. Louis, the elites, the respectable people, don’t appreciate his art, it seems like Jones is doing anything he can to antagonize them: taking over the Old Courthouse to teach painting to black workers, hanging Soviet posters there. And it’s that conflict—that conflict he’s an eager party to—that seems to fuel his best work. It’s almost as though he needs St. Louis to push against. And once he decamps for New York and he’s around a lot more like-minded people, his work deflates.

MMW: Yeah, he needed a fight. Communism needs a fight; that’s the whole point. It’s an imperative: Painting was meant to instigate. He took a very combative position, and it seemed to fit him. Most artists have a golden period, and that’s sort of it for him.

That’s a pretty typical thing, that artists have these moments where everything works and they’re able to convey something about that moment that’s lasting—and that’s Jones, he’s one of those artists in the ’30s who’s deeply empathetic and wants the world to change—he’s a leader in that. But then the world changes. It isn’t just that Jones moves to New York. The Communist Party itself changes. And also, he has The Met, he goes to New York and he has Cézanne and he has Breughel. In St. Louis, he’s making up his own language. And you see the change in his paintings: in New York, they’re much more sophisticated in color and glazing. And he doesn’t have a fight anymore…

In one sense I suspect he became a happier, more well-adjusted person, but yeah, that artwork does lose its connection; it becomes something he does because he just likes to paint… You know, he was so out-there, and it was so emotional and so boiling and so provocative. You can’t continue that. There’s a pretty deep emotional toll. He fed on it and you can’t do that for a long period of time, psychologically… So he picked not the most interesting choice for art history but maybe the healthiest choice for him. He made a kind of working-class choice in a certain way.

SLM: Let’s talk about American Justice. You must know this painting well, because it’s in the permanent collection of your museum. There are parts I love, but what seems so striking is that the parts don’t resolve into a whole.

Joe Jones, American Justice, 1933; oil on canvas, 30 by 36 in., Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

MMW: American Justice is part of this bigger moment for him. I’ve lived with that painting for a long time and you know, we have it up; I’m committed to that painting as a curator. I think it poses a moment in our history that we would like to cover up. And I think that’s the strength of Social Realism: it keeps us cognizant of our history. On the one hand, the success is that it is so early, he is so young when he paints that painting… he’s 23 or 24, young, and he’s just become a Communist—but he’s been active in strikes, he’s been hanging out down along the riverfront, so he’s not new to that sort of revolutionary or activist stance. But he’s new to Communism, and what he wants to do is paint that call to arms. So the sensationalism comes out of that. He’s trying to figure out a painting where you don’t just look at it and go “ooh.” He wants to paint a painting where you look at it and go, “Oh my God, I’ve got to do something.” He’s trying to come up with a visual language that will move people. And you’ve got to give him credit for trying to figure that out.

As a Social Realist, he’s one of the first ones that tries to create a model for a revolutionary painting. Up until now he’s been working in narrative language, and that’s the language of genre painting, of painting everyday life. What he is aspiring to—and I don’t think he would have had the words for this—is history painting. History painting is lofty painting, it deals with kings and love and war, these big ideas, and history painting uses symbols, it uses a symbolic language. You’re supposed to think of a bigger context—it’s not just war, it’s good against evil. That’s what he’s trying to elevate his painting to. And that’s the problem with the painting. On the one hand it’s incredibly ambitious, he’s just out there pushing himself. And it’s an honest, genuine effort to voice things. Where it fails somewhat is in its symbolic language. He takes something which is so deep and has such psychological terror and violence and he tries to convey it symbolically—and you really can’t. To mix the two of them is very difficult and he doesn’t do it so well. I think it is a very conflicted painting. It goes off into tangents. It isn’t really controlled. And I think that comes from not really being able to control his symbols.

SLM: Let’s end by talking about one of his unalloyed successes, St. Louis Riverfront. This is from almost the same time but it’s very different. I’ve seen where people thought it depicted two ships on a collision course, and noted the smoke blowing in two directions, and that the ship on the right has a red hull—but it’s the harmony of the picture that hit me.

Joe Jones, St. Louis Riverfront, c.1932; oil on board, 23 by 48 in., collection of Renée and Lloyd Greif

MMW: That is essentially the beginning of him trying to give voice to his burgeoning activism, and it also has something that I think shows up in his most interesting works, which is a really wonderful visual rhythm. And I think there’s really a feeling for St. Louis—the water, the smoke. He was one of those early Social Realists who was able to both be aesthetic and make social commentary. Many artists that early, the people who were doing social commentary, were graphic artists. Painting is a more complicated, complex thing, and his importance—and many of the New York critics noticed this—is that for once it’s not just propaganda. There’s an aesthetic here. It is a beautiful painting, it draws you in. There’s a painting ability that gets put into it. He can paint. And those aesthetics make a difference. It’s an intangible thing, but it’s there.

That’s someone who is a painter: They convey their world and it comes out in paint somehow. He does it. He’s got it.

“Joe Jones: Painter of the American Scene” is at the Saint Louis Art Museum through January 2; Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., $8 adults, $6 students and seniors, $4 children 6-12. Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., free to all. For tickets, call 314-534-1111, go to metrotix.com, or visit the museum, One Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park; 314-721-0072, slam.org