?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
JOE JONES (1909-1963)
Missouri Wheat Farmers. Lithograph. 253x203 mm; 10x8 inches, wide margins. Edition of 250. Signed in pencil, lower right. Published by Associated American Artists, New York. 1938.
A very good impression.
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. 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, where he furthered his artistic training. In August 1935, Jones painted a mural series at the Commonwealth College at Mena, Arkansas. He painted a New Deal mural for the post office in Charleston, Missouri, titled Harvest in 1938. This mural was done at the height of Jones' fame and is a classic subject for the artist. It depicts the harvest of wheat in a very labor-intensive manner showing the cutting, gathering, and stacking of it onto a wagon. Under a cloudy dark sky, wheat dominates the perspective with the farmers providing a great deal of motion. Another New Deal mural entitled Men and Wheat was painted by Jones in 1940, followed by Husking Corn in 1941 for the Dexter, Missouri, post office, Turning a Corner in 1939 in Anthony, Kansas and Threshing in Magnolia, Arkansas, in 1938. All the murals depicted some process during a wheat harvest.
