Jozef Bakos was a founding member of Los Cinco Pintores — Santa Fe's first organized modernist artist collective — and one of the most consequential early-twentieth-century painters of the city, an artist whose work reshaped the visual culture of New Mexico in the 1920s and remained at the centre of the Santa Fe modern tradition until his death.
Jozef Bakos (1891 – April 25, 1977) was a Polish-American painter born in Buffalo, New York, the son of Polish immigrants. He studied at the Albright Art School in Buffalo (later the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) from 1912 to 1917, where he won the Joseph Albright Medal and apprenticed with the painter Joseph E. Thompson, whose study in Europe and admiration for Cézanne shaped Bakos's early aesthetic. He taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder before making his first visit to Santa Fe in 1920 to see his childhood friend Walter Mruk, and returned permanently in 1921.
In 1921 he joined Mruk, Fremont Ellis, Will Shuster, and Willard Nash to found Los Cinco Pintores, "The Five Painters," whose manifesto in El Palacio declared a mission to bring contemporary art directly to the people of Santa Fe. The group built adjoining adobe studios along Camino del Monte Sol, organized exhibitions in Santa Fe, the Midwest, and Los Angeles, and gave Santa Fe its first organized modernist art colony before formally disbanding in 1926. He was also a co-founder of the New Mexico Painters group, which formed in part as a response to the Taos Society of Artists's rejection of his and William P. Henderson's work as too modern. His paintings are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and other institutions, and in 1985 the Burchfield Penney Art Center in his native Buffalo gave him a retrospective.