Joe Jones (AM 1909-1963) � Man with Wheel � Lithograph, ca. 1940, ed. of only 10, 10 1/8 x 7 �, signed, titled and annotated in pencil, �10 prints� and signed in plate. This piece is in excellent condition.

This print is from the provenance of William Gropper.

Joe Jones was almost entirely self-taught, as he quit school at age 15 to work as a house painter with his father. He began exhibiting his paintings and prints around St. Louis in the late 1920's. Jones became a member of the Communist party and a leading political activist throughout the decade of the Depression. His views were greatly criticized by mid-western conservatives and thus, Joe Jones left St. Louis for New York in 1935. Many of Joe Jones's paintings and prints from this era (including five large murals) were commissioned by the government supported Works Progress Administration. Also, in 1937, he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and his art was included in important exhibitions at the Carnegie Institute. In World War Two, Joe Jones worked as a war artist for "Life Magazine". During his career, Joe Jones's art underwent significant changes. His early paintings and prints (many depicting laborers and farm workers) were at the forefront of both Social Realism and American Regionalism. Until the end of the Second World War the large majority of Jones's prints were in the medium of lithography. Joe Jones made his first experiments in the newly invented art of the color silk-screen in 1945.