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Lois Mailou Jones (1905 – 1998) was a Harlem Renaissance painter. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts. (The term “Harlem Renaissance” refers to the flowering of African-American painting, literature and music in the 1920s and 30s.) Jones joined the faculty at Howard University in Washington D.C. in 1930 and helped to found the art department; she stayed as professor of design and watercolor painting until her retirement in 1977. In 1937, she went to Paris to study and paint. (In 1996, her work was part of an important art exhibit in the U.S. entitled "Paris, the City of Light" that examined the importance of Paris as a center for African-American artists during the 1920s and 30s). She married Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel in 1953 and moved to Haiti.

 

Some of her work incorporates African and Haitian subject matter. This one does not. Critical comment on Jones says that she abandoned her early impressionism and came under the influence of European modernism, a style concerned primarily with the qualities of color and flatness. Her work then became more hard-edged, and more precise and brilliantly colored. Certainly this view of Naples displays those qualities. It is geometry shorn of the pseudo-Baroque spinach that hangs off the façades of some of these buildings in real life. (“Pseudo-Baroque spinach” is my own contribution to the vocabulary of art criticism.) Whether or not this work “…achieves a self-referential autonomy… [and]…floats in some rarefied, ideal ‘Platonic’ zone, governed not by human impulse so much as by the mysterious internal laws of stylistic development…”, I don’t know. I also don’t know the exact title of this work. I’ll guess The Vomero Hill in Naples or San Martino in Naples. I don’t know the date either. I’ll guess: 1960. If you know, please tell me.

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