GRANDMA MOSES in the 21st Century

Arts & Activities, March, 2001 by Mark M. Johnson

Everyone has heard of "Grandma" Moses, one of America's most heralded untrained painters, and practically a national folk hero. The moniker "grandma" was given to her and seemed more than appropriate, as she picked up the brush in her 70s, having never had a formal art lesson.

Moses embarked on a new career at an age when most people have long since retired, and in 1940, at age 80, she was given her first one-woman show. For two decades, she continued to create in her wonderfully unique style and produced 25 paintings in the year following her 100th birthday.

Born Anna Mary Robertson on Sept. 7, 1860, in Greenwich, N.Y., she was raised in the country and sporadically attended a rural school until she married Thomas Salmon Moses in 1887. The couple moved to a dairy farm near Staunton, Va., where they raised their family. They had 10 children, although five died in infancy.

As a child, Anna Mary loved to paint; in fact, her brother said she called her pictures "lamb scapes." Unfortunately, the demands of a young marriage, a growing family, and a demanding farm business allowed little to no time for a pastime like art.

In 1905, the family returned to rural New York and settled in Eagle Bridge, not far from Anna Mary's birthplace. Here, Moses resumed the responsibilities of a farm wife and received recognition for her culinary creations. Homemade jellies, pies and canned goods earned her ribbons at the county fair. Occasionally, she would use house paint to decorate something like a fireboard, and her embroidered pictures were widely admired by both relatives and friends.

As Moses grew older, arthritis made it painful and difficult to wield an embroidery needle, so it was suggested that she try painting. Drawing from personal memories, she fondly recreated in paint the experiences and images of her past. As she never received training or lessons in art, her style is classified as "folk" or "naive." Without concern for the standard or academic conventions, techniques and practices of the art establishment, Moses was free to spontaneously create painted images that charm the viewer with their frankness and innocence.

Her first paintings were created as gifts for her family and friends and reflected a combination of her memories and a familiarity with popular prints such as those by Currier & Ives. She drew upon her own experiences to recollect landscapes, interiors and people engaged in activities; from the prints, she developed a sense of compositional and spatial organization, as well as a vocabulary of simplified figural vignettes.

She first displayed her landscapes in the window of a drugstore in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., where they were eventually discovered by Louis J. Caldor, an engineer and amateur art collector. After purchasing all the paintings on display, he brought her work to the attention of curators at the Museum of Modern Art, who included Moses in the 1939 exhibition entitled Contemporary Unknown American Painters.

The next year, Moses was given her first solo show at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. This exhibition, entitled What a Farmwife Painted, opened on Oct. 9, 1940, to favorable reviews. Moses' spry personality, "down-home" biography and folksy paintings charmed the post-war mass media, including the new medium of television, and Grandma Moses gradually developed an enormous international following.

Moses preferred to work in oil paint on a support of Masonite, hard board or cardboard, upon which she first built a ground of three coats of flat white paint. Her favorite scenes featured idyllic rural landscapes--prosperous farms and villages, under a fresh blanket of winter snow or in lush, full bloom under sunny summer skies--captured in time at the turn of the century. The compositions are then peopled with happy and active men, women and children involved in work or play activities. Often, several vignettes or sub-themes are presented, but both groupings and people are subordinate to the whole, as they are blended into a single unified composition.

By the time of her death on Dec. 13, 1961, at the age of 101, it is estimated that Grandma Moses had produced about 1,600 works ranging in size from 8" x 10" up to 36"x 48". Although she received enormous attention and enjoyed international adulation, she remained true to herself and to her simple rural origins.

Some may dismiss such works as being decorative or quaint; in defense, these paintings are honest recollections of a less-sophisticated past, perhaps a simpler, but not an easier, time, rendered with an unconventional freshness that characterizes the American folk style at its best.

Like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses occupies a unique position in American art history and has reached a level of recognition that permits her to be included within the folk-art realm, as well as the mainstream of traditional art. For that reason, her works are found in numerous major museum collections ranging from the Museum of American Folk Art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.