Bakos's career runs along the seam between two of the most generative early-twentieth-century American art traditions — the Buffalo-based academic-modernist current that came out of the Albright school, and the radically reorganized Santa Fe scene of the 1920s — and his work belongs at the centre of both.
Bakos came to art through the Polish immigrant culture of early-twentieth-century Buffalo. His parents had emigrated from Poland and built a working life in the city; his own training took him through five years of disciplined academic study at one of the most active art institutions in the upstate New York industrial cities of the period. The medal he won there marked him out as a serious young painter, and his apprenticeship under a teacher whose own European study had given him a deep familiarity with Cézanne and the broader post-Impressionist tradition gave him the early framework on which his own style would be built.
The decision to head west came through friendship rather than artistic ambition. The 1920 trip to visit Walter Mruk, made on a break from his teaching post in Boulder, brought him to a Santa Fe he had not anticipated and that he found immediately compelling. The decision to return permanently the following year placed him at the start of one of the most important moments in early twentieth-century American regional art.
His role in founding Los Cinco Pintores made him one of the principal architects of the city's modernist self-image. The group's commitment to "bring art to the people" — exhibitions in schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons, alongside the more conventional gallery shows — placed them within the broader American progressive tradition of art education, while the adjoining studios on Camino del Monte Sol and the shared exhibition program gave them a coherent collective identity. Touring exhibitions across the Midwest and to the West Coast in the early 1920s brought their work to a national audience, and although the formal Society dissolved by mid-decade, the relationships and institutional commitments it had built remained the basic structure of the city's modern art world for the next several decades.
His own painting moved across the 1920s from the expressively brushed, Van Gogh- and German Expressionist-influenced canvases of his early years to a more structured Cubist-derived idiom of clear forms, simplified shapes, and strong color blocks. The subjects remained constant — the New Mexican landscape, Pueblo ceremonies, adobe architecture, floral still lifes, and the occasional figure or self-portrait — but the formal language he applied to them sharpened and clarified across the decade. The Taos Society's rejection of his work as too modern, and his subsequent co-founding of the New Mexico Painters with Henderson, locked in his identity as one of the city's principal voices for a more advanced contemporary practice.
His later decades were spent in continuous work in Santa Fe, where he and his wife Teresa lived and painted until his death. The 1965 oral history they jointly recorded for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art remains one of the substantial first-hand documents of the early Santa Fe modernist scene. His work has been continuously exhibited and collected since his death, and his position today is that of one of the foundational figures of twentieth-century New Mexican modernism.