Whenever Fadjo Craven called, Bobby Roberts answered. Roberts was an archivist for the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, and the fast-talking Craven always had a line on old manuscripts and books.
This time, Craven knew about a painting found in a closet in Fort Smith, Ark. Actually, the painting was the closet. Someone had chopped a Masonite mural into 29 small sections, covered portions in wallpaper and lined a large storage closet. The images depicted three scenes: miners striking, sharecroppers starving and a black woman fighting to halt the lynching of her husband. Would Roberts be interested?
"Of course I was," Roberts said. "I paid $500 sight unseen."
That was 25 years ago. Roberts soon learned that the mural came from the shuttered Commonwealth College, a bastion of radical socialism in nearby Mena, Ark. And the painter was St. Louisan Joe Jones, a card-carrying communist and the darling of the New York art scene.
"The images were pretty shocking," Roberts said. "I'm a historian, not an art critic, but I could feel their power. Jones' interpretation of Arkansas — cotton growing, union busting and lynching — was probably not far off the mark, I suspect, for those days."
Roberts urged the university to restore and display the work, but the money was never there. And then there's the mural's brutal subject matter.
"No one ever said it to me, but there are two schools of thought in this state: 'It's best to know your past, no matter how bad it is,' and the other is, 'Let's not talk about that,'" Roberts said.
Roberts moved on to run the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock. And the painting languished in storage.
Until now. The lynching scene serves as the centerpiece of "Joe Jones: Painter of the American Scene," a major 80-work retrospective that explores the artist's career from 1930 to 1942. The exhibit opens Sunday and runs through Jan. 2 at the St. Louis Art Museum.
HOT ON THE TRAIL OF LOST WORK
St. Louis Art Museum senior curatorial assistant Janeen Turk and her boss, American art curator Andrew Walker, knew of Jones before starting their research four years ago. The museum already owned a dozen works, and a simple Google search reveals that Jones taught art classes for the unemployed at the Old Courthouse and painted two covers for Time magazine.
But they didn't know that he painted houses in St. Louis, or had an affair with a local socialite, or that early in his career, the New Yorker called him "the most promising artist of the season."
"We really were breaking a lot of new ground," Turk said. "For all of the press coverage there was in his day, he no longer had a high profile. He had been forgotten."
Turk read letters, interviewed Jones' old friends, even combed dissertations about radical colleges like Commonwealth College. That trail lead her to a University of Arkansas photograph of a mural fragment. The discovery wasn't artistic pay dirt. Curators, like detectives and journalists, hit more dead ends than jackpots.
"My first thought was if it does exist, you can't do this show and not have it," Walker said. "We began a letter-writing campaign and finally, after what seemed forever, got a call from an archivist and she said, 'I've been avoiding calling you back because this is something I haven't wanted to deal with, but yes, we have the mural.' And I said, 'You mean the fragment.' And she said, 'No, the whole thing.' I was like, 'Oh, my God. You are kidding me.'"
PARALLEL PASSION AND SKILL
The Aug. 15, 1935, edition of the Commonwealth College Fortnightly announced that Jones and his students planned to paint a mural if they could raise $50 in supplies.
"Joe moves his paint brushes around with lightening speed — a hangover from the speed-up system in house painting," a Fortnightly reporter wrote. "A person who stops to see Jones at work is kept glued to the spot for hours — for it's as intriguing as watching a spider spin its web."
Jones, 26 at the time, sent his mom a clipping along with a note scribbled in the margins: "Dear Mom, We use blankets down here at night, a swimming hole a few blocks away … Will you send me a carton of Chesterfields? They cost $1.75 here. Sis can buy them at Famous for about $1.10."
Before arriving in Arkansas, Jones painted dock workers in St. Louis and farmers in St. Charles. Other local subjects included the Eads Bridge, the Civil Courts building and the Cathedral Basilica, which he could see outside the window of his Central West End studio. Bold, muscular and colorful, Jones' style recalls another famous Missouri artist, Thomas Hart Benton.
"They both believed that there is valid subject matter for great art right in front of you," Walker said. "But while Thomas Hart Benton tended to look nostalgically at a pure and simpler world, Jones was more of a social realist who saw an opportunity to address injustice. His passion for his beliefs very much paralleled his skill as an artist."
Jones had worked for the Works Progress Administration but bristled at possible government interference. Commonwealth gave him the freedom — though not the resources — to paint what he chose. Students burned wood to make their own charcoal and collected $1 donations from friends.
"When I think about this project, I think of those old movies, 'Let's put on a show. I'll get the chairs. I'll get the lights,'" Walker said. "It wasn't a master directing students. It was a world of equals working in this dining hall to address issues they were passionate about. He believed paintings in public spaces have that force of change."
Commonwealth College closed by the end of 1940. Jones, by that point, had left the Midwest — and his radical politics — behind. He designed ads for Lucky Strike cigarettes and painted sailboats and harbors. His work was no longer a rebuke to racism and oppression but, as he told Time in 1951, a reaction against "the preoccupation with light and shade that has victimized Western art since the Renaissance." Doesn't get more bourgeois than that.
Walker said: "Figurative art began to be surmounted by abstraction, and Jones didn't fit into that. Where figuration continued was in advertising. He found it financially rewarding, and he continued to receive a certain amount of press coverage, but his work wasn't as strong."
Jones' youngest son, James Jones, was born 15 years after his father finished his mural. Joe Jones married his second wife, Grace, in 1940 and moved to suburban Morristown, N.J., where they raised four children and entertained their many friends.
"I was 13 when my father died (in 1963) and, for me, much of this has been a whole new discovery," said James Jones, an Episcopal clergyman in Miami. "He was never political when I was growing up. He didn't vote. He wasn't politically active. My guess is that he realized his commitment was to being an artist, not an activist."
SAVAGE BUT SALVAGEABLE?
Walker and Turk hurried to Arkansas to see the mural. The condition was as bad as they feared. Paint flaked off the Masonite, wallpaper clung to corners. But underneath the grime, Turk could see Jones' trademark style.
"There were elements that were very gruesome that you couldn't make out in the black-and-white images," Turk said. "It was disturbing."
But was it salvageable? Walker started e-mailing photos to museum conservator Paul Haner. Yes, it would take hundreds of hours, but he could save one of the three sections. The museum had neither the time nor the money to restore the entire 40-foot-long by 11-foot-tall mural, much less the space to display all of it. Walker and Turk decided to borrow the lynching scene.
"It's a very provocative scene, and we like that," Walker said. "It's about black strength and the power of the woman trying to defeat the white overseers. It was courageous in its unflinching willingness to look at a difficult subject matter."
University of Arkansas gallery director Brad Cushman caught Walker's enthusiasm. He had never seen the work and only vaguely knew it existed. He called the university television crew to shoot the mural and lobbied the chancellor to restore the remaining sections.
Cushman understands why the university never displayed the work. A mural that graphic demands context and sensitivity. He hopes that a proposed campus center for race and ethnicity studies one day will provide an appropriate home.
"We had been its guardian for 25 years," Cushman said. "And now is the time to get the rest done."
He plans to visit the exhibit this week. So does James Jones, who is seeing his father's hometown for the first time. For their part, Walker and Turk are thrilled that the museum has helped restore both an important work of art and Jones' place in American art history.
"There is something seeing an 11-foot physical object that can only happen in a museum," Walker said. "To think this was in someone's closet is bizarre. Talk about a creative reuse."
