Józef Bakoś

Jozef Bakos was born in East Buffalo, New York of Polish heritage. Beginning in 1912, Bakos attended night classes at the Albright Art School, and graduated in 1917. In August 1918, he and fellow Buffalonian Walter (Wladyslaw) Mruk left for Colorado to join their Buffalo friend John Thompson, with whom Bakos had studied privately. The three men, joined by another Buffalo artist, Augustine Korda, shocked the Denver art scene, accused of Bolshevism with their modernist approach to painting.

In 1920, Bakos moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he and Mruk became founding members of “Los Cinco Pintores,” the first modernist painting group in Santa Fe. Their fellow members were Fremont Ellis, Willard Nash, and William Shuster. According to art historian Stanley L. Cuba, their goal, “(spearheaded by Bakos)” was “to bring art to the people, including prison inmates and factory workers. Los Cinco Pintores (The Five Painters) “built adobe houses next to one another on the Camino del Monte Sol, the town’s first mini-art colony,” but their group disbanded by 1925. Meanwhile, in 1922, Bakos joined other New Mexico artists and writers to lobby against the Bursum Indian Bill, which would have dispersed the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico if it had passed. In 1923, Bakos also became a founder-member of The New Mexico Painters and later served as secretary in 1927.

Bakos painted the New Mexico landscape, and his work was shown in major national museums, including the Pennsylvania Academy, Whitney Museum of American Art, Carnegie Institute, and Albright Art Gallery. His work is in the collections of the Whitney and Brooklyn Museum in New York, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Delaware Art Museum om Wilmington, Denver Art Museum, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In 1985, the Burchfield Art Center presented a solo exhibition of his art.