A New Look at Moses

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 30, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

After a life of hard work, Grandma Moses took up painting and, in short order, became one of the most beloved artists in America. But she was dismissed by the critics -- until now.

She signed her paintings in firm, clear letters, often followed by a period. No one paid much attention to them at first, which led her to make one of her famous quips: Her preserves had received countless prizes at county fairs, but her paintings received nary a one.

Grandma Moses was enormously productive. When she died in 1961 at the age of 101, she left behind more than 1,600 works done over a period of about 20 years. As she would say more than once in her pithy way: "I had always wanted to paint, but I just didn't have time until I was 76."

She never expected fame but, by the time she died, Americans had purchased an estimated 100 million Christmas cards with images of her paintings. She made the covers of Life and Time magazines and was interviewed by broadcasting legend Edward R. Murrow. But she chose to remain at home on her farm in Washington County, N.Y., surrounded by family and longtime friends.

The public loved her; the art world didn't. Anyone looking at standard histories of American art in the 1940s and 1950s, when Grandma Moses flourished, is hard-pressed to find her name at all. Critics refused to take her seriously, using "primitive" and "naive" as pejorative terms to dismiss her work.

That negative evaluation is called into doubt by a thoughtful new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. The collection of 87 of her paintings will travel to six other museums across the country during the next two years (see sidebar), a fitting progress for an artist described "as American as apple pie."

Grandma Moses was born Anna Mary Robertson in Greenwich, N.Y., in 1860. Both her mother and father were descended from Mayflower pilgrims. At age 12, she went to work for a nearby farming family. Fifteen years later she married Thomas Salmon Moses, a hired hand on the same farm, and they moved to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where they worked as tenant farmers. Anna Mary, who added to the family income by making butter and potato chips, bore 10 children, five of whom survived to adulthood. She and Thomas also saved enough money to buy their own farm in 1905 at the small town of Eagle's Bridge in upstate New York, near where both were born.

It was there that Anna Mary turned to painting in the 1920s. "If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens," she said in her matter-of-fact way. "I would never sit back in a rocking chair, waiting for someone to help me." Her direct, decisive approach reflected her no-nonsense practical Yankee background.

Her works carry rifles such as Back Yard at Home, with its view of two barns and a garden, and Sugaring Off, a snow-covered scene of two farms alive with parents and children making maple syrup, with a country church not far away and mountains in the distance. On occasion, she painted indoor scenes -- the magnificent Quilting Bee is an example. But most often she turned to landscapes from a bird's-eye point of view, such as her Hoosick Valley (From the Window). At the painting's top and sides is the window's trompe l'oeil curtain, giving the viewer the feeling of sitting aside the artist in the upstairs bedroom she used as her studio.

Her method was simple. Moses collected images that caught her eye from newspapers, magazines and postcards and arranged them in ways that pleased her on pressed-wood boards. She then traced the outlines of the scenes she had decided upon and, after completing the outline, rendered everything in paint.

Moses herself described her decisive experience: One day, looking at the convex surface of an automobile hubcap, she saw her farm and the valley reflected in way that pleased her supremely. Into that format, Moses realized, she could insert the myriad details she loved to include in her work: people (dozens of them), farms and their outbuildings, country churches and, above all, landscape stretching in all directions.

Her human beings often pale in size in comparison to the landscapes she painted -- small figures lost in the greatness of nature. For many commentators, this is proof that she thought humans insignificant when it came to the outdoors. But surely this isn't the case. Few painters have rendered human beings with greater love than Moses, who showed her people going happily about their lives and chores and in cozy community with others. Her point, far from man's insignificance, is that people and nature form a single unit.

This exhibition calls for a re-evaluation of Grandma Moses's place in American art history. The time has passed when good art can be defined as "accessible only to a limited few," declares an essay in the show's catalogue. Now we see that the prejudice that separated her from the "serious" artists of her time was nothing but an "illusory conceit" that sprang from the fact she was so popular.

Far from harking back to a rural America that no longer exists, Moses' paintings offer "a quite spirited defense of elemental values that may still have a bearing upon the lifestyles and ethical options of our social future." That's the conclusion of the catalogue's final essay, and it's one that the exhibition bears out. What's most pleasing about the show, however, is that it proves this gifted woman painted what she loved, and managed to render that love in so many of her paintings.