Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 1, 2024: Joe Jones, an American painter, landscape painter, lithographer, and muralist (#2039)

Joseph John Jones (1909–1963) was an American painter, landscape painter, lithographer, and muralist. Jones was associated with the John Reed Club and his name is closely associated with its artistic members, most of them also contributors to the New Masses magazine.

Jones was born in St. Louis, Missouri, self-taught, he quit school at age fifteen to work as a house painter, his father's profession.

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. His work is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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.
In the 1930s Jones was associated with the Ste. Genevieve Art Colony in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. He visited there and also taught. He served as direction in 1936

Perhaps Jones' first appearance in New York came with his painting "Wheat" at the Whitney Museum's Second Biennial of Contemporary American Painting (1934–1935).

In 1935, Time magazine ran its first story about Jones: "Housepainter" (June 3, 1935). It reported that Jones had contributed a painting to the "Sixteen Cities Show" in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

In 1937 the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired at least one Joe Jones painting as part of (then) 85 paintings of living American artists. The same year Jones was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to document conditions in the Dust Bowl. His work was still being classed as "proletarian" in a Time article.

In 1943, Joe Jones was enlisted into the War Art Unit. Although the Army background check revealed Jones was a member of the Communist Party, the art program's chief advisor, George Biddle, supported him, stating that Jones was "willing to swear that he never had any intention or obligation to disrupt the American Government". Jones was assigned to the Alaska Defense Command, at Fort Richardson, outside Anchorage, Alaska.

By 1952, Time had cited him as one of 48 artists whose 250 paintings had been commissioned by Standard Oil of New Jersey. Time mentioned Jones with other of the 48 artists by name: the other two were Peter Hurd and Thomas Hart Benton.

For May 1961, Jones painted The Faraway Places for a Time cover story in its Modern Living section on travel. Time announced his addition to "the small group (about 80 men over the past 38 years) who have painted a Time cover." According to a Letter from the Publisher, Jones, who had done little foreign travel, "riffled through scads of travel photographs" and produced a work depicting a girl from Tahiti, cliffs near Beirut, a Greek island, and a Portofino harbor.

For December 1961, Time used one of his paintings for their annual Christmas issue.

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