Grandma's Golden Rule
But with all the hoopla surrounding the latest (and surely not the last) Grandma Moses exhibition, I thought I'd better have a look for myself.
Grandma Moses (a.k.a. Anna Mary Robertson Moses, 1860-1961), the farmer and homemaker from upstate New York, has been saluted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts as one of the “most respected folk artists” of the pre-World War II period, a “media superstar,” and “probably the best known woman artist of her era.” “Moses was a folk artist until she became famous, but then she became a popular painter, and her art was dismissed because of its mass appeal,” said Jane Kallir, guest curator and co-director of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York.
Maybe I'm just bitter. Perhaps I'm jealous of her meteoric rise to fame (during the 1940s and 50s). For, strange delight, I was pleasantly surprised by the exhibit. Arranged into five sections — “Early Work and Development,” “Work and Happiness,” “Place and Nature,” “Play and Celebration,” and “Late Work,” — all of the 80-odd pieces encompass what seems to be Grandma's Golden Rule: “Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”
All-American Folk Artist
As the story goes, Grandma Moses never had time to paint until she was about 76 years old. She was too busy raising her ten children (five died in infancy) and carrying out a number of things required of a mother and farmer at the time: cooking, baking, laundering, soap-making, candle-making, cleaning, and managing the fields. Before marrying Thomas Moses (a “hired man”), she spent fifteen years as a “hired girl” on a neighboring farm, where she doubtless learned all of the indispensable motherhood skills.
It's more than a little hard to believe that this simple housewife from rural America would eventually be featured on the covers of Time and Life. But she was. Moses was self-taught. She painted from memory, and was probably one of the first of a generation of “memory painters.” Moses's sister actually suggested that she start painting when arthritis made it too painful to continue embroidery, another one of her self-taught skills.
And so, along with her homemade jam and embroidery, Moses began showing her paintings at local fairs and craft shows. In 1939, Louis Caldor (an engineer and amateur art collector) spotted her paintings in a drugstore in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., and was able to get three of them in the Contemporary Unknown American Painters show at the Museum of Modern Art. A year later, Otto Kallir gave Grandma Moses her first real exhibition, What a Farmwife Painted, at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City, which pretty much landed her a berth in the art world. From her one-woman show at the Galerie to the countless features in television, film, books, and holiday paraphernalia, Moses would suddenly become an all-American folk artist.
Unique Place in Art History
The museum has chosen a remarkable selection of Moses's work, a true challenge given the fact that she created over 1,600 pieces in so little time. Her paintings take on an impressionistic look, perhaps stemming from her experience with embroidery. As the museum notes, Moses duplicated the method used in her embroidery, whereby multicolored strands were juxtaposed. In her paintings, this same technique captured the subtle shades of seasonal color changes. This method is clearly visible in the artist's landscapes. Moses was primarily a landscape painter, and it is in these examples of her work, including “Moving Day on the Farm” (1951), and “Rainbow” (1961), her last finished painting, that we recognize her sharp sense of place and her intimate environs. Some of her narrative paintings are extremely busy, yet depict a certain amount of charm. “The Quilting Bee” (1951, pictured at very top) is a delightful example of this.
With Grandma Moses in the 21st Century, the National Museum of Women in the Arts has given us the clearest, most concise look at Grandma Moses and her place in art history. And with all her everyday memories now secured on canvas, Grandma Moses has given us a glimpse back in time, and a reminder that “life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”
Grandma Moses in the 21st Century will travel with stops at the San Diego Museum of Art, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Huntsville Museum of Art, Tulsa's Gilcrease Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum.
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online. All images courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.)
“Grandma Moses was an acute observer of the nuances of season, weather, and time of day, but she was not particularly concerned with accuracy when it came to depicting specific local landmarks or events,” writes Jane Kallir in the Spring 2001 issue of Women in the Arts. “To be sure, she commemorated many such places and happenings, but she was truer to her memories than to historical reality. Just as her figural vignettes assumed a purely symbolic function, her paintings evoked the past without literally illustrating it.”
