Joseph Meert

Joseph Meert was a Belgian-American artist who trained as a regionalist painter under Thomas Hart Benton, then turned toward abstraction later in his career. He believed the purpose of art was to express the beauty of nature, both through representational paintings and abstract compositions.

Joseph John Paul Meert was born on April 28, 1905, in Brussels, Belgium. His family immigrated to Kansas City when he was five years old, where his father worked as a carpenter for the Union Pacific Railroad. Meert received a scholarship to attend the Kansas City Art Institute from 1923 to 1926. He then studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he was mentored by some of the most famous painters at the time: Kenneth Hayes Miller, Boardman Robinson, John Sloan and Thomas Hart Benton. There he also developed a friendship with brothers Charles and Jackson Pollock.

In 1935, Joseph Meert met Margaret Mullin, a New York artist and painter, and they soon married. He then took a job at the Kansas City Art Institute as Thomas Hart Benton's assistant from 1935-1941. During this time, Meert painted four murals in Missouri and Indiana for the Work Projects Administration. He also belonged to the Ste. Genevieve Art Colony for several years in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. 

After Thomas Hart Benton left the Kansas City Art Institute in 1941, Joseph Meert and Margaret Mullin returned to New York City. In 1946, they joined an experimental artist group devoted to abstract art. This was a turning point in Meert's career, leading him to explore abstract painting and other materials such as stained glass. Meert and Mullin also deepened their friendship with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. In 1943, Meert saved Pollock's life after finding him passed out drunk in a snowbank.

Despite his renown within the art world, Joseph Meert never found financial success, and toward the end of his life his mental and physical health deteriorated because of it. After Mullin's death in 1980, Meert developed a deep depression that was incorrectly diagnosed as schizophrenia. With no income besides Social Security, he became a ward of the state and was placed in a nursing home under heavy sedatives. 

In 1985, author Jeffrey Potter discovered Meert's condition while writing a Jackson Pollock biography. The Pollock-Krasner foundation soon gave a grant that allowed Meert to move to a better facility in Cheshire, Connecticut. There he began painting again with the help of art therapists, and created a final body of abstract watercolors before he died in 1989.