This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov 5, 2010 - In the 1930s and '40s Joe Jones was ascendant, a celebrity in St. Louis, a good-looking guy with a big smile and bright blue eyes, sure enough of himself to paint a self-portrait so thoroughly in the style of Cezanne his face looked as if it were Mont Sainte-Victoire itself. Jones was sought after, written about, photographed, gossiped about and enthusiastically appreciated as a gifted painter and quite good company.
His good looks helped him in his ascent, but what he really had going for him was talent as a painter of which he was totally certain. From the beginning of his assuming the mantle of artist, when he painted in the late 1920s that extraordinary self-portrait, his artistic abilities were evident not only to friends and patrons here but in important places in New York City.
There was a renaissance-man quality to him. He was a polemicist and social activist as well as a painter, and a pedagogue, too -- for a while he ran a racially integrated school for out-of-work artists in the Old Courthouse. The Jones curriculum was politically radical enough to get the studio shut down with a padlock on its door. He also taught at a communist school in Arkansas called Commonwealth College, whose refectory he decorated with a mural depicting the sad state of human affairs in Arkansas. More about that in a minute.
We are fortunate indeed that finally someone has had the gumption to mount an exhibition of his work. That person is Andrew Walker, curator of American art and assistant director for cultural affairs at the St. Louis Art Museum.
Jones's work - paintings, drawings and some extraordinary photographs - are presented beautifully in the museum's "Joe Jones: Painter of the American Scene" (through Jan. 2, 2011). The show focuses on the important years of Jones's career. It is a visual and intellectual tour de force.
In "Joe Jones," a viewer discovers how a talented regional painter and political thinker could, within a rather short span of time, reach extraordinary heights in his art and in his political influence.
Like many a poor bad boy bristling with serious talents, Jones skyrocketed from his humble, near-impoverished house-painter past into the living rooms and to the dining room tables of smart and well-heeled St. Louisans. Rather than repelled by his challenging, frankly and unapologetically modernist pictures and his left-wing politics, his new friends and patrons seemed mesmerized by them. The financial largesse of some of them carried him through what could have been rough times indeed. Of some of them, he painted hauntingly insightful portraits.
Photographer Martin Schweig Jr., a pillar of the local arts establishment, has vivid childhood memories of Jones, who "seemed to be at our house a lot for dinner." Jones was not the only artist to show up at Aimee and Martin Schweig Sr.'s dinner table. Max Beckmann came there, too, as did Paul Burlin and Stephen Greene. "Aimee," her son said, "was a good cook," but she was also gifted painter and conversationalist; and artists, musicians, art historians, writers, and, yes, newspaper men and women, gravitated to her.
Her husband, Martin Sr., was no slouch either. He worked as a photographer in a studio called Schweig Art Nouveau on Delmar, just east of Kingshighway, and produced exquisite pictures. At the urging of Aimee, Schweig Art Nouveau was an art gallery as well as a photographer's studio. Martin Jr. followed his father to photography and established a successful artistic and commercial career. His older sister, the redoubtable Martyl Schweig Langsdorf, who goes professionally by the name Martyl, is an uncompromising artist who continues to produce art, well into her 90s.
"Jones was a mover -- good looking and controversial. He was a communist, and the undercurrent of subversiveness added to the romance," Martin Schweig Jr. said. "I was 8 or 9 years old, and I remember vaguely the talk about his getting a divorce, which was big stuff in those days. He was in and out like the wind. He'd appear at our house, and then months would go by, then he'd appear again.
"There was the talk about his girlfriend, lots of gossip. As far as Aimee was concerned, it was fine - he had a girlfriend. Then they were off to the East and that was sort of the end of it. But I kept hearing stories," Schweig said. The girlfriend was Grace Adams Mallinckrodt, not a Mallinckrodt by birth but married to one, Henry, until she took up with Jones, and they were busted.
"Aimee said, 'Now that he's gone off with a Mallinckrodt, let's see how long he remains a communist,' " Schweig recalled with a laugh.
As time went on, Jones's social conscience indeed was diluted, and so was his art. What had been original and fresh early on, linked more to the maelstroms of modernism in Europe, caught the regionalist bug, and his dragged-down work began looking like imitations of Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Burchfield. There is plenty of this stuff in the show. The museum spares us the very later work, a thin-gruel version of Bernard Buffet-ish magic realism, which casts shadows on Jones's former brilliance.
That assessment is followed by a truckload of buts and howevers.
First, we have in Jones's work an authentic vision and voice, and a talent that, at its most sensitive and muscular, can be recognized as a tributary to the mainstream of 20th century American art. Within that tributary are multiple streams. Look carefully and you'll see visual quotations from the work of artists such as Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe and Otto Dix. There also are strains of movements as epochal as Cubism and its less well-known American offspring, Synchromy; the home brew of regionalism; surrealism.
All that borrowing was done honestly and was conjoined with Jones's own artistic vision. The works I most deeply admire by him - his portraits -- exhibit a mannerist frisson and the ability to drill deep into the psyches of their subjects. The portraits are enigmatic, compelling both in their restraint and psychological canniness. Perhaps the greatest and most telling is the portrait of his father, of whom we see only his back and an empty bottle of liquor.
Jones was both urban and urbane, and close behind the portraits in superiority are his vivid and lyrical cityscapes, pictures created with artful jugglings of geometries, works of art of sure and certain vitality, genuine metaphors and expressions of urban life and the built environment. The jazzy rhythms and deeply felt blues set up in them perform affecting sets of visual music.
This work is a joy for St. Louisans to look at; in addition to being admirable for its originality and strength, it reminds us of the visual resources we have here, resources too often overlooked and taken for granted, and helps to reinforce a growing appreciation of the intrinsic qualities of this place: of the river, the Eads Bridge, the riverfront, the skyline, an out-of-the-way street corner.
Because of their formal and abstract qualities, and the dramatic juxtaposition of shapes and color, their impact extends far beyond the quotidian, the merely illustrative or documentary.
As Jones went along, and as he became more and more famous, his work took a turn, and at first it provided uncompromising, in-your-face descriptions of America's underclass, its disposable populations, its poor and disenfranchised blacks and poor whites.
He not only taught in St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve at Aimee Schweig's art school and colony there; but also at the proudly leftist Commonwealth College in Mena, Ark. There, he ended up painting a high-volume mural of racial prejudice, miscarriages of justice and what he identified as the base evils of American economic life.
One of its panels, rescued from decay by the museum and restored to life by museum conservator Paul Haner, is a dominant image of this show. While important and shocking, it also reveals Jones, in 1935, veering off into literal social commentary and coming close to caricature: political cartooning writ large. It is unsettling for reasons of content and for the fact that it reveals the artist losing the control that balanced politics and aesthetics. Sensationalist politics won.
Historically, his heyday was a time not unlike our own, beset with social uncertainty and unrest, jangled by bad news coming in from Europe again and with America mired in what seemed to be an intractable economic depression and covered by a plague of dust.
Jones felt this deeply, for that world was his world, too. Like many intellectuals and artists, and many men and women who knew the venomous bite of poverty not only from observation but also from experience, he felt compelled to do something. His political hammer was his art, his sickle rhetoric. Initially, as he addressed the plight of workers, African Americans and the destitute in his work, he struck that delicate and effective balance between polemics and aesthetics mentioned above, a balance that presented messages of social justice searing in their subtlety and effectiveness while maintaining the standards that elevate art above mere verisimilitude.
When he put the emphasis on revealing the less obvious psychological demoralizations rather than more evident physical ones, the consummation of the two maintained his presence as a master in the world of capital A Art.
Recently the Sunday New York Times books section ran a review of Stephen Sondheim's "Finishing the Hat." Singer-songwriter Paul Simon reviewed the book. I was jolted by this passage, perhaps more because I was in the midst of writing about Joe Jones:
"[T]he heart/mind dilemma is a constant for many songwriters, myself included," Simon wrote. "If a writer composes a lyric with a complex thought or vivid image and fails to say it well, then the lines seem pretentious. If the songwriter goes for the heart and misses, then it's sentimental. Sondheim is the farthest thing from a sentimental songwriter that I know, but his songs of the heart are shaded with a rueful sorrow ("Send in the Clowns) and translucent compassion."
And so it was with Joe Jones. When he painted with a complex thought or vivid image and painted it well, the results were indelible. When he went for the heart and affected it deeply, the work could challenge minds and affect change. But when he missed, and began making a habit of missing, the strength of his art diminished, losing the qualities it had when it blazed out of St. Louis with glory, poetry, power and grace.
As his St. Louis champions died off, and America moved into the cyclone of Abstract Expressionism and from there to the ironies of Pop, Jones's art and his even his name, dropped off the marquee. Walker must have comprehended that presently, were something big not done, Joe Jones would be forgotten altogether.
We must thank Andrew Walker for this seductive save, for making certain we will not easily forget the man and the artist who was Joseph John Jones.