Art: Angry Man Calms Down

In his fiercer aspects, Joe Jones* was one, of the angriest proletarian painters of the 1930s. His canvases were packed with demonstrators, motherless waifs and starving victims of capitalist greed. In his milder moods, he turned out farm scenes in the best Midwestern tradition, with bright, theatrical coloring. Said Joe Jones, simply and violently: “I want to paint things that knock holes in walls.”

This week a new show by a new Joe Jones was on view in Manhattan: 20 delicately colored, wiry-lined pictures of beaches, towns and harbors, scenes just as American as his old bosomy wheatfields, but painted with a French accent something like Dufy’s, astringent instead of earthy, and without a spark of sorrow or anger in them. Even Jones’s signature had changed from bold printing to graceful handwriting.

Said the new Joe Jones, a boyish, successful and supremely confident artist at 42, “I didn’t want to sit on top of a reputation.”

Surprise, Surprise. Jones got his confidence and painting experience the hard way, after a rowdy but resourceful childhood in St. Louis’ drab north side. His first sketches, chalked on his school walls, landed him in the reformatory, where he spent six months (aged ten) for petty vandalism. In his late teens, while working as a house painter, he studied colors and composition by himself, at 19 won a prize in a citywide art competition. Five years later, one of his pictures was exhibited at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art.

By the mid-’30s, he was painting in the gusty mood of Thomas Benton’s rising Midwestern school. But the strained, angry faces he gave his farmer subjects betrayed the influence of Marxart. Swayed by left-wing friends and the memories of a rough childhood, the ex-house painter went socially conscious with a vengeance. In 1934, after an uproar over his teaching of mixed white and Negro art classes in St. Louis’ Old Courthouse (where slaves had once been auctioned), Jones joined the Communist Party.

The glamour of being a revolutionary ultimately wore off, and Jones found that his artistic progress was being slowed to a stumble by the party lockstep. Moreover, he found out, rather to his surprise, that the party was not just a place to let off steam but “a political movement.” Increasingly enmeshed in the pleasures of bourgeois life, the rising young painter had no time left for party politics. Finally, he got out.

Space, Not Objects. After he erased “class war” from his pictures, Jones found he was equally unhappy painting bouncing yellow wheatfields (which by 1940 were on view in the country’s leading museums). On a trip to Alaska as a war artist in 1943, he began to experiment with delicate lines and low-toned colors. In a show held the next year, he unveiled the result. (“People said they were French. What the hell—they were more Japanese than French, and anyway I’m American and they were paintings.”)

Jones describes his new style as a reaction against “the preoccupation with light and shade that has victimized Western art since the Renaissance.” His goal is to create “space, not objects.” “I’m not interested in the humanism of the subject. I’m interested in the humanism of the line.”

His new paintings sell considerably better than the old ones. He now lives comfortably in Morristown, N.J. with his wife and four children. He has become more & more intellectual about his paintings, and it makes him smile a little. “I was always against the intellectuals. It’s good to be against ’em until you are one,” he says. “Then you can be for ’em.”

*No kin of James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity.