Joseph P. Vorst

Joseph P. Vorst (1897-1947) was a St. Louis painter active in the 1930s and early 40s. Part of the famous Ste. Genevieve School of artists, Vorst specialized in rural scenes of southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas. He was attracted to the African Ameri- can sharecroppers who struggled to survive in both the Depression and what was a generally hardscrabble life. He depicted these men, women and children with an air of determined nobility. A native of Germany, Vorst was raised with a deep respect for the land and those who worked it. He immigrated to St. Louis in the late 1920s and died there in 1947. Vorst is associated with the American Scene movement. He was friend and colleague of Thomas Hart Benton and shared a studio at one time with the Kansas City painter. He is been represented in major collections including the Chicago Art Institute, the Corcoran Gallery, the Whitney, the Smithsonian, the St. Louis Art Museum and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art where he was re- cently included in a survey exhibition: This Land: Picturing a Changing America in the 1930s and 1940s. The work is reproduced: page 95 in An American Art Colony: The Art and Artists of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, 1930-40, by Scott Kerr, St. Louis Mercantile Library, pub., 2004