Artist Joseph Lambert Cain, known as Jo Cain, was born on April 16, 1904 to Julia Blum and Joseph Lambert Cain in New Orleans, Louisiana.in 1919 when he was 16, Jo left high school in Houma, Louisiana to study cartooning and drawing at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. At 17, he moved to New York to work for the Art department of the New York Herald. In 1921 Jo moved to Philadelphia where he gave himself a “college education” by reading the “world’s hundred greatest books” and engaged in solitary art making. In 1923 he returned to New York to study with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Kimon Nicolaides and Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Student’s League and Mechanics Institute and later with Arshile Gorky at the Grand Central Art School and Hans Hoffman at the Hoffman School. During this period, Jo made many artist friends and began to exhibit paintings while working as staff artist at the New York Times and as the Art Director for the Yale University Publication, Pageant of America.
In 1929 Jo received a Carnegie Fellowship to Study at the Sorbonne in Paris and travel throughout Europe. Upon his return in 1930, he was selected for multiple Tiffany Foundation fellowships during which he met painter Matene Rachotes, another Tiffany fellow who became his wife in 1935. Jo was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Medal for his painting, Elysian Fields, and had five of his paintings included in a travelling exhibition of Tiffany artists. After his Tiffany fellowships, Jo received support from a private patron (Stanley Lathrop, Director of the Tiffany Foundation) that enabled him to paint full time for several years.
As a result of these honors, 1932 Jo was invited to exhibit a painting called Burlesque in the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum, where his work was so highly regarded that it was hung in the entrance of the exhibition. Following his success at the Whitney, Jo was chosen to exhibit at a number of important venues including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, The Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Institute, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.
In 1933, Jo received a major state and federal commission personally supported by Eleanor Roosevelt to create a series of murals for the New York Training School in Warwick, NY. His 20,000 square foot mural presented an epic vision of the works of humankind, with special sections on spirituality, history and technology.
this work was the largest mural produced in the United States to that date and made him a key figure in the developing muralist movement. In 1935 Jo was elected member of the New York Mural Painter’s Society and contributed to WPA mural projects in Phoenix, Arizona. See: http://archive.org/details/JoCainMuralsCombinedScrapbookAndStudiesOCR
Though two of Jo’s studios burned down and many of his early works were destroyed, Jo did not pause to regret the loss, but kept painting. After a honeymoon painting trip through the South in 1935, Jo and Matene spent their winters painting urban scenes of New York City and their summers in an old schoolhouse they bought in the Delaware Water Gap, painting rural Pennsylvania landscapes.
During this period, Jo showed his work in such galleries as American Artist Congress, Boyer, GRD Studio, Plaza, ACA, and Midtown Galleries, among others. In the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, articles about Jo’s work appeared in Vogue, The Art Digest, The New York Times, The New York Post, and The New York World Telegram, among others.
In the ‘30’s and early ‘40’s, Jo and Matene were integral members of the New York art scene. Jo founded and served as Secretary for a notable coalition of artists called “the Group,” which convened regularly in the Cain’s loft on East 11th St. “The Group” counted among its members: artists Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, John Marin, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottleib, Amédée Ozenfant, Marsden Hartley, along with intellectuals Alfred Barr and Louis Mumford, among many others. Their project was to bring the same level of recognition to American Modernism as was
Having taught at Finch Junior College, Ethical Culture and Dalton Schools in NY, Jo left New York to accept a teaching position at Goddard College in 1941 and at the University of Rhode Island (URI) in 1944. He went on to found and head the URI Art Department and oversaw the development of a distinguished undergraduate program in contemporary painting, drawing, sculpture, and art history. With his wife, he co-founded and co-taught the very popular “URI Summer Art Workshop by the Sea” which ran from 1945 for more than 15 years. Sketches and paintings he made at the seashore during this teaching activity led to many of his major paintings of boats, fishermen, and the sea.
Jo was an active member of the College Art Association. He frequently spoke about contemporary art at such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and many universities and schools, as well as on the radio. He organized avant-garde film screenings, hosted lectures by noted artists, and curated exhibitions for Rhode Island’s South County Art Association, URI, and elsewhere.
He was an enthusiastic and persuasive advocate of contemporary and outsider/world art and of essential role of hands-on creative expression in education at all levels. Along with writing an unfinished autobiography and two unpublished children’s books, Jo co-authored and published an introductory art appreciation text, Art is the Artist, with Frederic Clayton.
With his wife Matene, Jo created a hybrid modern/antique home in an old carriage house in colonial Kingston where URI is located. He filled his home with primitive and folk art from around the world amidst Pennsylvania Dutch and contemporary American furnishings. The Cain’s home was featured in several magazine and newspaper articles.
Throughout his career, Jo persisted with his artistic endeavors, creating more than 500 paintings and innumerable drawings. Drawings made during sabbatical travels to the South in the ‘50’s and to Europe in the ‘60’s inspired new series of paintings and ultimately a series of figurative sculptural reliefs made from plastic. He continued making art for nearly 20 years after his retirement from the University in 1970.
Jo’s work evolved continuously. Moving from realism in the ‘20’s, he developed a highly personal, cubism based, abstract style similar in spirit to that of Stuart Davis and clearly influenced by Leger, Matisse and Picasso. In the ‘50’s and ‘60s, his work became increasingly abstract, but returned to figuration in a final series of sculptural reliefs made from colorful plastics. Most of Jo’s carefully studied compositions feature the human figure and all of them evoke universal human themes. Jo used his great skill as a draftsman and his sophisticated sense of color to portray a dynamic, joyful world that he greatly adored.
Since 2000, Jo’s paintings have been shown at D. Wigmore Fine Art in New York City, Acme Fine Art in Boston, the Charleston Renaissance Gallery in Charleston, NC, the David Klein Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, the Grier Clarke Gallery in New York City and Stowe, and the David Findlay Jr. Gallery in New York City. Jo’s works are held in distinguished public and private collections including the Greenville County Museum in North Carolina and the Johnson Collection in Spartanburg, South Carolina.