Housepainter

Housepainting is a good way to learn the feel of a brush, the mixture of colors. It also gives one plenty of time to think.

Housepainter Adolf Hitler thought up Naziism.

Housepainter John Kane took 67 years to get around to sending a real painting to Pittsburgh's Carnegie International Show in 1927. Today he is rated "one of the few great American painters of this age." Horny-handed, one-legged Irishman Kane never had an art lesson in his life. Painting pictures brought him large fame (TIME, Sept. 19, 1932), little cash. Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. paid less than $150 for one of his pictures (see p. 33). Kane loved Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh was proud of him. Seven years after his art career had been established, he died at 74 of tuberculosis, leaving his widow about $5,000 in cash and a pile of pictures that are now worth as high as $1,500 apiece.

Last week a second U.S. housepainter, this one from St. Louis, definitely moved into John Kane's shoes with a one-man show in Manhattan's A. C. A. Gallery.

Joe Jones loves St. Louis as John Kane loved Pittsburgh. The paintings of both are powerful and precise. There their resemblance ends. Joe Jones is a handsome, aggressive youngster who takes no patronage from anybody. At 14 he finished St. Louis' Benton Grade School, ran away to California, ran right back to his housepainter father whom he has since painted, with a gin bottle and from the rear to hide the fact that he had but one arm. Father Jones said: "The worst thing about that whole business was sitting there all that time beside the empty bottle."

Joe and his father painted houses until Depression put the family on relief. Joe began to associate with one Harry Mathes, manager of a St. Louis shoe store who liked to paint pictures in his back room. In 1930 Joe got married and later won a 100 prize in the Artists' Guild show in St. Louis.

Soon he began to feel his oats. Far from apologetic for never having had an art lesson, he boldly lectured St. Louisans on art, organized a group known as the "New Hats." Said he: "I want to paint things that will knock holes in the walls." In the same mood he turned Communist. Impressed, St. Louis began giving him one-man shows, more prizes. Joe sent a picture to the Sixteen Cities Show in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, with an autobiography: "Joe Jones. Born St. Louis, 1909. Self-taught."

Expanding, he started an art class for the unemployed, blacks and whites, in St. Louis' Old Courthouse where the Dred Scott decision started in 1848. The bewhiskered secretary of the orthodox Art League which runs its classes in the same building blew up. Joe Jones sneered: ''The Art League classes . . . attend for a pleasant evening, to look at the nudes and to have tea and cookies which are usually served."

The summer of 1933 Jones spent in Provincetown, painted not one seascape. Back to St. Louis he went with a John Barrymore mustache, announcing, "class consciousness. That's what I got out of my trip to New England. Those people are like the Chinese, ancestor worshippers. They made me realize where I belong."

So energetically did Jones return to where he thought he belonged that last December St. Louis' Director of Public Safety Chadsey lost patience, threw Jones's art class out of the Courthouse. On the walls of the Manhattan gallery last week were signs of Joe Jones's Communism--We Demand, Garbage Eaters, Demonstration, The New Deal. There was also unmistakable talent and power. Notable was American Justice, a vivid picture of a prostitute who had been lynched by hooded Ku-Kluxers. St. Louis and environs were there in fat wheat fields, freight sidings, Second and Biddle Streets, Missouri River. Chimed the critics: ''An auspicious affair, uneven in quality but interesting throughout and full of promise."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.