I’m not interested in painting pretty pictures to match pink and blue walls. I want to paint things that knock holes in walls.— Joe Jones, 1933

　　“Provincetown Makes Artist a Communist” proclaimed an article in the September 21, 1933, issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Certainly, the news of yet another figure in the nation’s cultural or intellectual world making such a commitment during the “‘Red’ Decade” of the 1930s was hardly shocking. The artist was Joe Jones, one of St. Louis’s up-and-coming native sons. In May he had made his first trip to New York City, en route to Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of the most renowned art colonies in the country, where he spent the rest of the summer. While it was assumed, or at least hoped for, by those interested in his career that the experience would mark a significant development in the twenty-three-year-old artist’s life, this was not exactly the turn they had expected. This essay addresses the nature of the consequent urban-protest works Jones produced and, especially, the proscriptive and descriptive role played by Communist ideology in the racial, political, and economic issues that these images engaged.

　　Jones did not find Communism in Provincetown as much as he settled on it there. The artist’s social outlook had been formed in the gregarious camaraderie of bohemian radicals who gathered alongside local wharf workers in the grimy haunts of the Mississippi River levee. The Blue Lantern Inn, situated in a rat-infested warehouse near the foot of Washington Avenue, was favored by “local neophytes of the arts, the theoretical rebels and young iconoclasts.”There Jones, ex-housepainter-turnedartist; Orrick Johns, poet and former drama critic; Jack Conroy, ex-miner-turned-writer-and-editor; and William Sentner, architect-turned-union-organizer (and Jones’s grade-school playmate), joined others of a similar disposition who dismissed Prohibition-era sobriety as they wrestled with the profound issues overwhelming a country in the throes of the Great Depression. In 1932 twenty thousand businesses went bankrupt, and wages were cut by forty percent. In St. Louis, over thirty percent of the population was out of work, with over eighty percent of African Americans either un- or underemployed; the city’s relief system spent thirty-eight percent less per capita than any other city its size. Johns later remembered that mile-long Hooverville, where the most desolate of St. Louis’s residents lived, hung over the river bank, south of the bridges, and was cut off from the city by a network of railroad tracks. I had seen many similar shanty towns in the west, stalked by hunger. . . . But . . . I had never seen such stark destitution as that on the river front of South St. Louis. The people were practically imprisoned there, discouraged by police and watchmen from going into the city.

　　Strikes and demonstrations became more and more common. The activities of the Communist Party on behalfof those suffering in St. Louis gained widespread attention and respect, following the leading role its members played in organizing a massive demonstration on behalf of the city’s unemployed in 1932. Many in the arts showed their solidarity with workers by participating in the demonstration, and a local John Reed Club—the cultural arm of the Communist Party and open by invitation to members and nonmembers alike—was established. Conroy, Johns, Sentner, and Jones all joined the organization.

　　There are clear indications that Jones’s increasingly leftist beliefs had begun to dwell uneasily beneath the modernist patina of his pre-Communist canvases. A reviewer of his first one-person show, in 1933, noted the underlying tension in a version of St. Louis Riverfront: “Two river packets, with belching smoke-stacks, tossing about violently on the calm waters of the Mississippi, careening toward a collision. . . . From some the smoke blows north, from others south. Crazy enough. But any crazier, the picture asks you, than millions in want because the world has too much of everything?” The reviewer quoted Jones’s explanation that such interpretations were what he was “groping toward. . . . I’m not interested in painting pretty pictures to match pink and blue walls. I want to paint things that knock holes in walls.” In Provincetown the artist found a way to make sense of the overwhelming experience of the Depression when he joined “the society of a small group of painters, teachers, and working people who chose to spend their time studying and discussing the economics of Karl Marx.” Communism addressed Jones’s “undefined yearning . . . [for] a definite philosophy on which to predicate his art. . . . Henceforth his art would be outspoken.” In short, Jones’s subtext of social revolution had found an explicit voice.

　　Much of the interpretive framework of Jones’s socialprotest paintings, drawings, and prints has been lost over time as scholars have identified the work more generally with the broader characteristics of Social Realism of the 1930s.However, to be a Communist artist during the Third Period of the Communist Party (1928–35) entailed not only a more specific agenda than Social Realism, but also one that often acted in opposition to the aims of non-Communist social realists. In essence a Communist artist was a class-conscious worker whose production—art— acted as a weapon in the impending revolution to end fascist structures of power and give laborers control over their production in an ideal Communist state. There was a call for artists especially from the working class. These “worker-artists” had claims of legitimacy as “insiders” in depicting the conditions and concerns of the proletariat. Rather than using their cultural achievements to move up in a class-based society, Communist artists retained their working-class identity in opposition to the elite status of the cultural world. Allied with workers, artists focused on the dynamics of their localities, coupled with the impassioned aim to incite in workers the revolution that would eliminate suffering and injustice.

　　Jones’s working-class background, revolutionary zeal, and Midwestern roots made him an exemplary worker- artist. Though lengthy, two descriptions of the artist convey that his contemporaries understood him and his production in this role. Stephen Alexander, reviewing Jones’s first solo show at the American Contemporary Art (A.C.A.) Gallery, New York, in 1935, wrote:

　　Jones has come by his Communism as naturally as he has come by the normal heritage of the average worker, manual or intellectual, today—that is, through insecurity, unemployment, class justice and the terrific struggle for existence. His art is a living expression of his participation in this struggle and grows organically out of the environment and the people he knows. . . . But he does not stop at simply giving a faithful visual report. It is when he adds a class-conscious mind to a trained hand and eye, that he achieves his most significant expression.

　　And Johns’s description of Conroy and Jones is equally illustrative:

　　Jack Conroy, of Moberly, Missouri, editor of The Anvil . . . was the new man, the agrarian-industrial Ulysses of brutalized road life in America, the worker who learned Latin and mathematics by himself to enter the university, who wrote and wrote for years inobscurity, who corresponds with everybody and reads everything. It is no wonder that he was fearless, that he smashed through the polite timidities and said his say. Joe Jones, son of a one-armed house painter of St. Louis, himself member of a house painters’ local, big, rangy, swift and swift-thinking, who almost alone of the PWAP [Public Works of Art Project] in St. Louis challenged the opportunist trickery of the Museum-boss administrators, and who carries on an unemployed art class, in a room of the old Courthouse wrested from the authorities.

　　Far from being an intellectual ideologue like many leading Communists, Jones embraced the party in an uncomplicated and earnest fashion, as had many rankand- file workers (he often took too seriously the mockery and high jinks in which Conroy and his band indulged). And, as noted, much was made of his membership in this rank and file. He was the grandson of a stonemason and the son of a housepainter. He quit school at fourteen to help support his family, which ended up among the city’s poverty- stricken on relief. He retained his housepainters’ union membership, and as a member of the artists’ union refused to work on a government project because of pay conflicts.

　　In part Jones constructed his worker-artist identity in opposition to the elitism of the art world. He continued for a while, as a fine artist, to work in his painter’s overalls and cap and use “ordinary house painting equipment”; when he exhibited for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, his biography—the chance to introduce himself to New York’s art world—stated starkly: “Joe Jones. Born St. Louis. 1909. Self-Taught.” He gained wide notice when he ran his wet finger over Diego Rivera’s controversial (and barely finished) mural, Detroit Industry (1932–33), in the Detroit Institute of Arts, proclaiming to shocked onlookers that this was how housepainters determined whether paint had been mixed correctly. “If it works with the house painters,” he declared, “why shouldn’t it work with Rivera?” When Jones returned to St. Louis from Provincetown, he moved into a houseboat “propped on the ruined levee, with black industrial St. Louis all around him [as he] paints fiercely, angrily,” asserting his identity with destitute river workers and Hooverville inhabitants over his middle- and upper-class patrons, who would have been more comfortable with the expected bohemian studio. Interviewers described him as virile, turbulent, brash, boisterous, and irrepressible. His rather confrontational approach to the establishment seemed perfectly to embody the revolutionary zeal of his paintings and was complemented by the apparent genuineness of his Midwestern character. A “blue-eyed giant, [he] looks the way his name sounds—of good plain American stock, with an open face, freckles on his wide cheek bones and the hands of a man who can toss hay with the haying crew.” His pose in a work apron, showing sweat, muscles, and tattoo, and leaning forward on a simple utility table, suggests why even those not in the sway of leftist sentiment could not help but see something genuine in him. According to an article in Art Digest:

　　A modern novelist inventing a creative figure to express the American scene in these years would logically find him somewhere in the Middle West, would give him a plebeian name and most likely an artisan’s background, and would expect him to look a little like a baseball player probably, to grin when he talks and to talk pugnaciously and with wisecracks. Society has forestalled him and invented Joe Jones in exactly that image.

　　Worker-artists felt compelled to differentiate themselves from the pervasive documentary mode of Social Realism. As artist Jacob Burck wrote, “It is up to the revolutionary artists to help pave the way for a complete break with bourgeois culture by developing new plastic revolutionary expressions which embody the aspirations of the working class for the desired classless state.”15 Proletarian art needed to be performative in order to provoke its audience to act, whether through anger or empathy. It needed to operate in the imperative rather than the declarative: it did not say, “Look at this fight”; it said, “Fight!” Mural painting was considered an effective means of accomplishing these goals, especially given that at the time the three most well-known Mexican muralists— José Clemente Orozco, Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—were working on projects in the United States. As Milton Brown noted, “The impressive achievements of the Mexicans in creating a public, socially oriented, representational, popular art of international stature under a revolutionary government by drawing on the past as well as on indigenous forms and traditional imagery, converged with and stimulated the interest in mural painting.” It is not surprising that the very first visit Jones made on his initial trip to New York was to the New School for Social Research to see murals that had been executed there by Orozco and the American Thomas Hart Benton.

　　Jones’s first chance to paint a mural as a worker-artist occurred within a few months of his return from Provincetown, and it marked his most successful endeavor to bridge art and workers in class struggle. Jones was accepted on the PWAP, and through much wrangling he began to teach an art class two evenings a week for a racially integrated group of unemployed students in St. Louis’s Old Courthouse. As a collective unit, Jones and seven of the students, five of whom were African American, created the no-longer extant Social Unrest in Old St. Louis, a 16-×-37-foot mural done in chalk pastel that incorporated straightforward visualizations of Communist issues embedded in episodic scenes set along the Mississippi River levee. In the upper left, a freight train loaded with men heads for a veterans’ demonstration in Washington, D.C. This scene was intended to remind soldiers, whose loyalty to capitalist democracy was hard to shake, of the aftermath of the 1932 Bonus March. This huge rally was organized by veterans of World War I, many out of work, to demand that bonuses they had been promised, which were to come due in 1945, be paid out now. Army forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, used bayonets, tear gas, and tanks to clear out the protestors— unarmed veterans— still lingering in the city; hundreds were injured and several killed. In the lower left of the mural, unemployed African Americans loiter in front of a pawnshop as they watch two roustabouts load a river packet named City of St. Louis. The pawnshop window displays the Blue Eagle, symbol of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), suggesting that help from New Deal programs was actually encumbering (like a loan), making workers into “pawns.” In the lower right is a baptism scene in which African Americans line up to obtain the religious assurance of salvation. They merge with a gathering of agitators who surround a soapbox orator. The messages on the signs they hold—“Save the Scottsboro Boys!,” “Hands Off Cuba!,” “Down with Fascism!,” and “Don’t Starve, Fight!”—were all well-known Communist Party slogans.

　　The party opposed New Deal policies because, in its view, they encouraged the development of fascism out of a crisis in capitalism. Accordingly, depicted on the far left-hand side of the Old Courthouse mural are the short-sighted and insufficient solutions of the New Deal, as represented by the Blue Eagle, whereas on the right are more effective responses to the major issues of the day supported by the party. The group around the pawnshop looks to the right, to the only two figures in the composition who are working, suggesting that the answer to unemployment rested with the Communists’ recognition of labor’s productive power. As Jones explained, “The baptismal group represents . . . religion as an opiate” and “the group of agitators, the natural evolution of discontent which cannot be appeased by religion.” Thus Jones presented New Deal policies and religion as appeasements proffered to mollify the proletariat, allowing the unimpeded growth of fascism and quelling the natural tide of revolution required to establish the workers in their rightful productive state.

　　While its narrative devices are fairly conventional, the Old Courthouse mural became a “battleground on which to transfer the class struggle.” In February 1934, when it was unveiled—surrounded by Soviet propaganda posters— Jones welcomed a fight. A reporter noted that “if it remains presentable for four or five months [Jones] will be satisfied. If objections cause its removal before that time, he will be more than pleased.” Over the ensuing ten months, Jones became an “irritating thorn” to city leaders as he maintained a combative dialogue over the mural. In March members of the National American Bands of Action (NABA), a local American Fascist League group, broke into the classroom. They tore up the Soviet posters that decorated it—a warning that they would destroy the mural—and inscribed the following in black letters on a sheet of muslin:

　　This is a public building, a building of the American people. We, as Americans, will not tolerate its use for the worship of any foreign idols or fetishes because it is un-American. It destroys homes and separates families, it destroys men as God meant them to be. We say that it must stop. Do you understand? We say [it] must stop.

　　Johns crowed to Conroy that “after the destruction . . . the workers actually turned out en masse to defend the mural—the best example I know of rallying workers for their own cultural rights.” The radicals continued their agitation, but when several of the African American members of Jones’s class and his wife, Freda, were arrested during a Communist-led unemployment demonstration at City Hall, the conflation of Jones, the mural’s topics, and the active protest was too much. On December 14, St. Louis Director of Public Safety George W. Chadsey declared the class a front for Communist meetings and ordered the students and teachers to vacate the building. Jones, still pushing the limits, asked Chadsey to participate in a symposium, “Art—Free or Dictated,” an invitation he declined. When Jones showed up for class on the 16th, he found that his classroom had been padlocked.

　　The conflict over the class and its mural jettisoned Jones to national attention among radicals. His eviction garnered protest letters from the Socialist Party, the American League against War and Fascism, and the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union.2Photographs of the mural were included in the “National Exhibition of Art by the Public Works of Art Project,” held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in April 1934. During a trip to New York in late 1935, Jones was feted by radicals and accepted several speaking invitations. Most notably, early the following year, he gave a talk, “Repression of Art in America,” at the public session opening the First American Artists’ Congress in New York. And in 1937, he was the only artist from the United States invited to the Congress of Revolutionary Writers and Artists held in Mexico City.

　　While such explicit Communist agitation certainly brought about the acrimonious assault by city officials and conservatives in St. Louis, the issue of race also played an important, if less publicly acknowledged, role. The Communist Party vigorously encouraged interracial organizing, postulating that racial prejudices were being perpetuated by industrialists and landlords as a way to direct workers’ antagonisms against one another rather than at those who controlled the system that oppressed them all, regardless of race. By integrating his class, Jones situated himself against the generally accepted, prejudicial practices of most of the art world—including academic training, museum acquisitions and exhibitions, commercial- gallery representation, and even New Deal programs (which only marginally sought to include blacks). His actions also clearly confronted the deeply embedded racial and class prejudices in St. Louis.28 NABA’s scrawled warning on a white muslin sheet, rather than paper, was a potent and intentionally thinly veiled reminder of the potential for Ku Klux Klan violence. When Jones’s class was evicted, Chadsey’s defense was that “the place is entirely lacking in the Bohemian atmosphere that you would expect if it were a genuine studio. . . . Jones says they are unemployed, members of the depressed and downtrodden classes, who want to study art. But they don’t look like artists to me.”29 At the core of Chadsey’scomments was the assumption that true artists are neither working class nor African American; importantly, in acting as such, Jones’s students were stepping out of their place. This, one suspects, is exactly what Jones wanted to reveal. Art, class consciousness, and racial oppression merged to incite the downtrodden to revolution.

　　Roustabouts locates the Old Courthouse mural issues more specifically in St. Louis’s long-established racist structures. The city gained its historical, economic, and political identity from its river trade; yet, as one of the city’s African American citizens aptly observed:

　　The steamboat was a part of a lazy economic system that was built upon the very backs of black men. . . . Its voracious boilers were fed pitch and wood by black men, its decks loaded and unloaded by black men, its cabin and staterooms served by black servants, its saloon and promenade strutted and enjoyed by white gentlemen. . . . No real attempt to understand the cultural roots of the Negroes of St. Louis can overlook or omit these lowly roustabouts. Indeed, they were the undertow of the monetary commerce that was making St. Louis into a city of major importance.

　　The politicized nature of Roustabouts is clarified when read against works by two other renowned Missouri artists, Jolly Flatboatmen in Port by George Caleb Bingham and The Deep South by Thomas Hart Benton . Bingham emphasized the marginalized racial and class position of blacks in the nineteenth century through such details as tattered clothing; however, the figures’ limp arms and work-worn, slumped postures reveal the absence of the strength needed to confront their situation. And, although Benton’s twentieth-century roustabouts seem vigorous, the energy of their movements does not coalesce into an evocation of discord, but rather constitutes a rhythmic, undulating visual motif that creates a sense of compositional and psychological harmony. At first glance, Jones’s narrative seems straightforward, with the dominance of the white boss conveyed in his centrality and position overseeing the black workers who stand below the dock in a barge. However, the repetition of downcast heads could suggest passive-aggressive resistance, and the authority visually vested in the white man’s height is in fact subtly challenged by the workers loading goods, especially the black man in the right foreground whose position counters that of the boss. The dynamic between economic and physical power weaves between boss and workers in a crisscross pattern. This pattern is reiterated, in concentrated form, in the foreground knot of rope, which seems to embody these tensions: it could loosen or tighten in response to the fluctuations caused by movement of the figures and the water below. The latent potential for revolution inherent in physical power seems to hover on the brink of erupting in this silent, sullen scene.

　　The increased racial strife of the early 1930s was signaled by the sharp jump in lynching across the South, from eight documented in 1932 to twenty-eight in 1933. Situating such violence within the problems of the economic inequalities of capitalism, the Communist Party called for art that would “explain lynching graphically and plastically. We must attack the social forces responsible for lynching.” American Justice is Jones’s response to this call. When he created the work during his stay in Provincetown, there were few models upon which he could draw, at least until 1935, when both the NAACP and the John Reed Club held competing anti-lynching exhibitions in New York that offered a wide array of visual and conceptual approaches to the topic. Though the painting has often been read as a rather straightforward narrative of a Klan lynching of a black female, a cryptic note to Jones after its inclusion in the 1933 Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum’s annual exhibition, American Painting Today, suggests that there might be more to the subject: “Your painting has created considerable talk here. One of my friends asked what it was all about, and I was very glad that I knew the reason for its being painted. It solved all my friend’s doubts.” The only comment Jones made about the painting’s content was in a letter to his St. Louis patron Elizabeth Green:

　　It is my personal interpretation, of a lynching that brought beauty out of such a fascinating subject—I want to ask a question, why do people who find beauty and love in a picture of a crucifixion painted by an Italian master even to the point of purchasing it, whydo they avoid a lynching? (which is exactly the same thing) and the handling is recognized as beautiful?

　　Drawing associations between lynching and Christ’s crucifixion was a strategy frequently utilized by the African American community to oppose accounts in the mainstream press that typically justified murder as retribution for sexual assault. Though few victims of lynching were actually guilty of the crime—or even accused of it—the association was cemented in the popular imagination. The terror inspired by the idea of a white Christian woman violently ravaged by a bestial black man assured a pervasive, if tacit, support of lynching. To counter the narrative of demonization related by persecutors (the lynchers), African American authors and artists told the story from the perspective of the victim seen as a Christ-like martyr. Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson all published poems about a black Christ; Johnson’s 1927 publication God’s Trombones contains an illustration of the Crucifixion by Aaron Douglas.