Anna Mary Robertson
Moses, better known as Grandma Moses, is arguably the greatest
American folk painter of the twentieth century. She is without a doubt
the most famous such artist, and possibly one of the most famous and
accomplished women of all time. Moses was also the first artist to
become a media superstar and the first American painter to achieve a
significant international reputation in the post-World War II era.
Nevertheless, despite (or perhaps because of) these impressive
achievements, and a biography that could not have been more perfect
had it been crafted by a Hollywood screenwriter, Moses remains
something of an anomaly within the context of modern art history.
Moses' extreme fame seemingly lifted her out of her original folk art
context, creating a perceptual gap between her generation of
self-taught artists and the nineteenth-century folk tradition from
which they all descended. Today, as the significance of
twentieth-century self-taught art is being reappraised, Moses
continues to stand apart, an outsider even within this genre of
outsiders. Nor, despite admirable strength of character and integrity
of vision, has Moses been heralded by feminist art historians,
possibly because they are put off by the quaintness of the artist's
public persona. Moses the artist is, however, no anomaly, even if the
extraordinary circumstances of her late-life career are unique. Her
work belongs to a long and rich tradition of American folk art, as
exemplified both in this century and before.
To understand Grandma Moses, in fact, one must place
her work not only within the context of the American folk tradition,
but within that of the modernist mainstream, which over the course of
this century has periodically picked out bits from the folk tradition
to use for its own ends. Prior to the Renaissance, little distinction
was made between high art and low art, fine art and craft. Over the
course of the ensuing centuries, however, an elitist tradition
developed which privileged the work of certain artists over that of
the common folk. This elitist tradition was codified and disseminated
through various institutions of patronage and education. Folk art,
then, was a catch-all category for the myriad forms of creation that
fell outside the system of high-art patronage and education.
During the first century of its existence, the
United States was woefully lacking in high-art institutions. The first
American museums were not founded until the 1870s, and artists who
wanted to learn European academic ways had to travel across the
Atlantic. As a result, America by the mid nineteenth century had
spawned a significant class of native folk painters. Largely or
completely self-taught, these artists combined elements of crafts and
fine art traditions. Often, they began by doing decorative work such
as sign or carriage painting. They absorbed the rudiments of academic
style second hand, through engravings, or if they were lucky,
apprenticed briefly with more formally educated colleagues. Much of
the output of these so-called limners consisted of portraits, for
which there was a constant demand in the days before photography.
Other pictorial records—of ships, farms, or prized livestock —were
less popular though not uncommon.
The advent of photography and commercial lithography
in the second half of the nineteenth century effectively destroyed the
market for these homespun portraitists. Yet, paradoxically, the
concomitant proliferation of commercially disseminated imagery
stimulated the creativity of amateur self-taught painters. Art
schools, museums, and art supply stores furthered this trend.
Grandma Moses, born Anna Mary Robertson on September
7, 1860, was a member of that watershed generation of amateur painters
who came of age after the heyday of the professional limner, but long
before the penetration of everyday life by the modern media. Living
her life on remote farms, she remained physically and intellectually
beyond the reach of mainstream culture. When she began to paint, she
did so for pleasure, and with little thought or realistic hope of
significant acclaim or remuneration.
Like most of the self-taught painters who would come
to wider attention in the first half of the twentieth century, Moses
was prevented by-economic circumstance from pursuing a lifelong
interest in art. Although as a child she loved to draw "lambscapes,"
and a teacher once praised her maps, Moses was taught to see such
pursuits as frivolous. Instead, a strict mother inculcated in her the
skills needed to survive on a farm. Even routine schooling was a
luxury often dispensed with: sewing, washing, making soap, and cooking
were the sorts of tasks a girl of Anna Man's social station had to
master. Her taste for pretty things found expression principally in
"fancy work, decorative sewing, hooked rugs, and, whenever she could
find an excuse, in painted embellishments on utilitarian objects such
as trays, jugs, or even birthday cakes.
Russell King Robertson, Anna Mary's father, had a
flax mill and farm in Greenwich, a small community in upstate New York
about thirty miles northwest of Bennington, Vermont. Whereas Anna
Mary's five brothers could help their father at the mill and on the
farm, she and her four sisters were increasingly seen to be a burden.
At the tender age of twelve, Anna Mary went to work as a "hired girl
on a neighboring farm, helping a wealthier family with the household
chores. She was to pursue this sort of work for the next fifteen years
until, at the age of 27, she met a hired man, Thomas Salmon Moses,
whom she married.
The year was 1887, and Thomas had been told that the
Reconstruction-era South was a land of opportunity for Yankees such as
himself. Within hours of their wedding, the couple was on a train
headed for North Carolina, where Thomas had secured a job managing a
horse ranch. However, he and his bride never made it beyond Staunton,
Virginia. Here they stopped for the night and were persuaded to take
over as tenants on a local farm. Anna Mary immediately fell in love
with the beautiful Shenandoah Valley—her chilly New York State home
(albeit mountainous) would forever after seem a "swamp" by comparison.
Life was not always easy, though. Anna Mary, who believed in pulling
her weight, bought a cow with her own savings and supplemented the
family income by churning butter. Later, when times were tough, she
made and sold potato chips. She gave birth to ten children, of whom
only five survived infancy. Still, the family prospered, eventually
earning enough to but their own farm.
Anna Mary Moses, known by then as "Mother Moses" to
main of her neighbors, would happily have spent the rest of her life
in Virginia, but Thomas was homesick. In 1905, he persuaded his wife
to return North. "I don't think a bit has changed since we left," Anna
Mary commented, "the gates are hanging on one hinge since I went
away." She and Thomas bought a farm in Eagle Bridge, not far from her
birthplace. They named it "Mount Nebo"—prophetically, after the
Biblical mountain where Moses disappeared. It was on this farm, in
1927, that Thomas Moses died of a heart attack.
Anna Moses was not one to sit idle. Though all her
children were grown, there was still plenty of work to be done on the
farm. Later she would joke, "If I didn't start painting, I would have
raised chickens." Or, upon further reflection, "I would rent a room in
the city some place and give pancake suppers." In 1932, Moses went to
Bennington to take care of her daughter Anna, who was suffering from
tuberculosis. It was Anna who showed her mother a picture, embroidered
in yarn, and challenged her to duplicate it. So Anna Man- Robertson
Moses began stitching what she called "worsted" pictures and giving
them away to anyone who'd have them. When Moses complained that
arthritis made it hard for her to hold a needle, her sister Celestia
suggested she paint instead. In this casual manner, the career of
Grandma Moses began.
Of course, Moses had painted from time to time
before. Her earliest datable painting is a large fireboard, clone in
1918. Ever practical, she painted this landscape only because, in
redoing the parlor, she did not have sufficient wallpaper to cover the
board that, in summer, is placed in front of the dormant fireplace.
Once, she saved a bit of canvas from an old threshing machine cover to
paint on. Moses recalled that Thomas had admired her artwork, and she
liked to think his spirit was watching over her, offering approval if
not outright guidance. At any rate, a few years after her daughter
Anna died, Moses returned to Eagle Bridge and started painting in
earnest.
Soon Moses had more paintings than she could
realistically make use of. She sent some along to the Cambridge
country fair, along with her canned fruits and jams. "1 won a prize
for my fruit and jam," she sardonically noted, "but no pictures." Here
Moses' painting career might have foundered. For, much as she loved
art, Anna Man' Robertson Moses was above all a sensible woman, and to
pursue art for art's sake alone would, by and by, have come to seem a
petty indulgence. But, in 1936 or 1937, Caroline Thomas, the wile of
the druggist in the neighboring village of Hoosick Falls, invited
Moses to contribute to a women's exchange she was organizing.
Moses' paintings sat in the drugstore window,
gathering dust next to crafts and other objects created by local
homemakers. for several years. Then, during Easter week of 1938, a New
York City collector named Louis Caldor chanced through town. Caldor
traveled regularly in connection with his job as an engineer for the
New York City water department, and he was in the habit of seeking out
native artistic "finds." The paintings in the drugstore window caught
his eye; he asked to see more and ended up Inning the whole lot. He
also got the artists name and address and set off to meet her in
person.
Moses' family clearly thought Caldor was crazy when
he told their Grandma he'd make her famous. And indeed, for the next
few years, it seemed the family was right. Caldor brought his trove of
Moses paintings to New York City and began doggedly making the rounds
of museums and galleries. Even those who admired the work lost
interest when they heard the artist's age. Turning 78 in 1938, Moses
hardly seemed worth the effort and expense involved in mounting an
exhibition; her life expectancy was such that most dealers felt they
would never reap a profit on their initial investment. Still, Caldor
persisted, and in 1939 he had his first limited success: The collector
Sidney Janis selected three Moses paintings for inclusion in a private
viewing at the Museum of Modem Art. However, this exhibition, which
was open only to Museum members, had no immediate impact.
Finally, in 1940, Caldor stopped at the Galerie St.
Etienne. Recently founded by Otto Kallir, a Viennese emigre, the
Galerie St. Etienne specialized in modern Austrian masters such as
Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. But Kallir, like many
of the pioneers who championed modernism in the pivotal decades
between the two world wars, was also interested in the work of
self-taught painters. In Europe, this trend had been established when
Picasso "adopted" the painting toll collector Henri Rousseau, and was
furthered by the published writings of the Russian-born Expressionist
Wassily Kandinsky. Essentially, these artists and their various
followers believed that the work of self-taught artists was purer and
more original than that of trained painters. In tandem with a
concerted effort to renounce academic tradition, the contemporary
avant-garde looked to the example of those who, for whatever reason,
had been denied formal training.
This passion for the "naive or "primitive, which
originated in Europe before World War I, first took root in America
after that war. Initiated, here as in Europe, by artists, the hunt for
art untrammeled by formal convention at first focused on the creations
of nineteenth-century limners and artisans. But by 1927, the quest for
a living exemplar of the genre— an American Rousseau, as it were—bore
fruit. At the urging of the artist Andrew Dasburg, the jury of the
Carnegie International agreed to accept the work of a common house
painter, John Kane, for inclusion in that prestigious annual
exhibition.
Kane's sudden good fortune—fostered by such
art-world luminaries as Duncan Phillips and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller,
and derided as a fraud by the tabloid press and a number of
disgruntled trained artists—paved the way for the emergence of other
kindred talents. By 1938, the Museum of Modern Art had enough for a
whole show, "Masters of Popular Painting." Included, in addition to
Kane and Rousseau, was a recent discovery, the brilliant
African-American painter Horace Pippin. The Museums founding director,
Alfred Barr, was bold enough to state that the history of modern
art—and his museum's mandate—consisted of three distinct but equal
strands: Surrealism, abstraction, and self-taught art.
It was within this rather august context that Anna
Mary Robertson Moses made her public debut at the Galerie St. Etienne
in October 1940. Otto Kallir had titled the exhibition "What a
Farmwife Painted," thinking that the artist's name, completely
unknown, did not merit attention. It was only some months later that a
journalist, interviewing friends in Eagle Bridge, came upon and then
popularized the local nickname "Grandma Moses."
The St. Etienne exhibition, though well publicized
and well attended, was only a modest success. What really got Moses'
career rolling was a Thanksgiving Festival organized by Gimbels
Department Store shortly after the St. Etienne show closed. A
substantial group of paintings was reassembled at Gimbels, and the
artist was invited to come to New York. In her little black hat and
lace-collared dress, and accompanied by the proprietary Caroline
Thomas, Moses (perhaps remembering her experiences at the country
fair) delivered a forthright public address on her jams and preserved
fruits. The hard-boiled New York press corps was delighted, and the
legend of Grandma Moses was born.
Until this moment, there was nothing to distinguish
Moses from the other self-taught painters, such as Kane, Pippin, and
Morris Hirshfield, who had been discovered in the preceding decade or
so. Yes, it was true that her style was different from that of the
others, but then this is one of the hallmarks of contemporary folk
art. Since self-taught artists, by definition, remain remote from
academic tradition, they make up their own styles from scratch. This
does not, of course, mean that such artists are completely
uninfluenced: Kane and Rousseau went to museums and copied art books,
and Moses collected magazine clippings and greeting cards from which
she extracted figural vignettes. But each of these artists interpreted
and integrated his or her respective source material in a personal
manner, rather than conforming to predetermined pictorial or formal
dictates.
Folk or self-taught art is a category largely defined in the negative:
It is not academic, it is not mainstream. Folk art exists outside the
boundaries of established artistic convention. Since most
aesthetically inclined individuals tend to seek formal training,
biographical circumstance plays a much larger role in defining folk
art than it does in mainstream art, for it is circumstance that
determines whether an artist will or will not be able to obtain
training. In nineteenth-century America, the prevailing biographical
circumstance was geography: Physical distance from academic
institutions alone was sufficient to create a native class of folk
painters. As the cultural climate improved, the prevailing
circumstance separating folk artists from the norm became economic:
Moses, Kane, Pippin, Hirshfield, and others of their generation simply
could not afford the luxury of studying art. More recently, as mass
communications have created a virtually unavoidable common visual
environment, folk art has largely been defined by psycho-social
circumstances. The so-called outsider artists who became popular in
the 1980s tend to be severely marginalized, frequently
institutionalized, or homeless.
What happened to Grandma Moses remains unequalled in
the annals of folk art. To put it bluntly, she failed to remain in her
place. The writer Roger Shattuck characterized Henri Rousseau as "an
object lesson for modern art." In truth, all folk art has functioned
as a kind of convenient object lesson, a place where mainstream
artists could go to recharge their creative batteries. Over the course
of this century, members of the avant-garde have regularly dipped into
various aspects of folk iconography, reinterpreting "primitive"
stylistic tropes in accordance with their own ends. Not only did this
strategy often help trained artists arrive at new and innovative
pictorial solutions, but these artists could proudly point to
parallels between their work and that of the self-taught as proof of
their own aesthetic purity. What the avant-garde mainstream could not
and did not do was accord the self-taught artist respect on his or her
own terms. Much as they might love folk art, modern artists and art
historians almost never granted self-taught artists parity.
In defiance of this pervasive prejudice, Grandma
Moses became a superstar. She did not do so willfully or suddenly, but
she did so nonetheless. Her talk at Gimbels in 1940 brought a burst of
publicity, and Moses was soon something of a local celebrity, but her
renown was confined to New York State. She exhibited at a number of
Upstate venues and began to be besieged by vacationers seeking
artistic souvenirs. For some years, Moses resisted signing a formal
contract with Kallir. believing she could manage matters herself.
Finally; in 1944, frustrated by the seasonal nature of her
tourist-oriented business and by difficulties in collecting payment
from some of her customers, she agreed to be represented exclusively
by the Galerie St. Etienne and the American British Art Center, whose
director, Ala Story, had also become a steady buyer of Moses' work.
The events that established Moses as a national and then international
celebrity followed in quick succession. Kallir and Story immediately
launched a series of traveling exhibitions that would, over the
ensuing two decades, bring Moses' work to more than thirty American
states and ten European nations. In 1946, Kallir edited the first
monograph on the artist, Grandma Moses: American Primitive, and
oversaw the licensing of the first Moses Christmas cards. Both
projects proved so successful that the following year the book was
reprinted and the greeting card license taken over by Hallmark. In
1949, Moses traveled to Washington to receive a special award from
President Truman. The next year, a documentary film on her life,
photographed by Erica Anderson, directed by Jerome Hill, and with
narration by Archibald MacLeish, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Her autobiography, My Life's History, was published in
1952.
The dawning age of mass communications gave the
public unprecedented access to Grandma Moses and her work. In addition
to traveling exhibitions, books, and greeting cards, people could
enjoy posters and even mural-sized reproductions, China plates,
drapery fabrics, and a number of other licensed Moses products. By
live-remote broadcast— then a technological marvel—Moses' voice was
beamed out from her home in Eagle Bridge to the larger world. A rare
use of color television was made to show Moses' paintings when she was
interviewed by Edward R. Murrow in 1955. And Lillian Gish portrayed
the artist in what may well have been the first televised "docudrama."
The rags-to-riches saga of the elderly painter
captured the American imagination. Facing the harsh realities of the
cold-war era, the public took heart in a real-life tale that seemed to
prove the old adage, "It's never too late. The media seemingly never
tired of repeating Moses fairy-tale story. In 1953, she was featured
on the cover of Time magazine; in 1960, Life sent noted
photographer Cornell Capa to do a cover story on the artist's 100th
birthday. That birthday—declared "Grandma Moses Day" by New York's
governor, Nelson Rockefeller—was celebrated almost like a holiday in
the nation's press. The fanfare was repeated the following year, when
Moses turned 101. Everyone rejoiced at the artist's longevity. Grandma
Moses passed away several months after her 101st birthday, on December
13, 1961.
While Moses would never have achieved a comparable
level of success without Otto Kallir's careful management, the artists
spectacular late-life career was in large measure due to circumstances
beyond the control of any one individual. Essentially, the Moses
phenomenon consisted of three interwoven strands: the artist's
downhome story, her art, and the peculiar exigencies of the early
cold-war years. The importance of Moses' biography should neither be
exaggerated nor underestimated. Starting with the Gimbels talk, people
were charmed—even thrilled—to note that the artist was as simple and
unaffected as her paintings. Both in her person and in her art, she
evoked the vanished nineteenth century, a seemingly calmer and more
innocent time.
Yet biography alone was not everything. Other old
codgers could, after all, paint—and in fact did so, once Moses got the
ball rolling. It seemed hardly a week went by without the discovery of
a new "Grandpa Smith" or "Auntie Jones. "Yet none ever had the impact
that Moses did. And although Moses' media appearances were, for their
day, sensational, they were relatively infrequent by modern standards.
She spent almost her entire twenty-one-year career undisturbed in
Eagle Bridge. By and large, what the admiring public saw was not the
artist, but her art.
The famous Moses style has been so often imitated
that it has become difficult for people today to see the real thing
with fresh eyes. Many assume that the appeal of Moses' work rests on a
nostalgic evocation of nineteenth-century rural life, but the
paintings themselves tell a rather different story. Moses' figural and
scenic vignettes are so nearly abstract that they are capable of
evoking the past in only the most symbolic sense. Her landscapes,
however, arc portrayed with an accuracy that is very much of the
present. There is thus a link between the past and the present in
Moses' work that seems to secure the future. The message is that some
things—the scent of summer on the winds of spring, the bite of the
first snow in November—do not change. Moses inspired not nostalgic
longing, but hope. Hers was a message that postwar America desperately
needed to hear.
Moses' extreme popularity inevitably separated her
from the ranks of other folk painters (such as Kane or Pippin) and
their more circumscribed audience. Fame also separated her from the
art-world elite that had championed folk art in its more obscure
moments. Moses' comparatively realistic style was juxtaposed—both by
her supporters and by her detractors— with the Abstract Expressionist
movement concurrently in ascendancy After a controversial 1943
retrospective of the self-taught painter Morris Hirshfield nearly cost
him his job, MOMA director Alfred Barr threw his lot in with the
abstractionists and abandoned his support of folk art. The rest of the
art-world elite followed suit.
For a number of decades, twentieth-century folk art
went into a kind of eclipse. Some of folk art's staunchest
supporters—including a significant faction at New York's Museum of
American Folk Art—seriously maintained that folk art had died with the
nineteenth century. Legitimate self-taught art. it was said, could not
survive in a technological age. Folklorists and art historians then
proceeded to split hairs over terminology with the folklorists
contending that true folk art has a communal, utilitarian orientation
that precludes the inclusion of any sort of autonomous
painting. Moses, Kane, Pippin, and their like were defined out of
existence.
Of course, one of the nice things about folk artists
is that the real ones pay absolutely no attention to such theoretical
squabbling. They simply go about their business, painting as they see
fit. It was perhaps inevitable that mainstream critics would one day
return to looking at such ad hoc artistic creations, which in truth
never ceased to exist. Self-taught art has always stood as a powerful
antidote to academic orthodoxy. And, as formalist abstraction itself
acquired the rigid veneer of academic orthodoxy over the course of the
postwar decades, folk art's appeal once again began to rise. The
present boom in folk or "outsider" art has been furthered by the trend
toward multiculturalism, which gives special attention to artists of
diverse ethnic backgrounds, just as Moses once represented a popular
alternative to the arcane doings of the Abstract Expressionists,
today's "outsiders" are hailed for their relative accessibility.
Elitism is momentarily on the out, populism is back in.
Curiously, none of this has had much effect on the
reputation of Grandma Moses. The presently voguish "outsider" work is,
after all, very different from hers. Living lives far more emotionally
or intellectually marginalized than Moses, "outsiders are often
inspired by extremely idiosyncratic personal visions. Few "outsiders"
see themselves as artists in the sense that Moses did, or learn or
develop consciously in the manner that she and her generation of folk
artists did. Thus, though Moses remains tied to the counter-tradition
of "the other" that has always favored self-taught art, she has no
place among the current crop of "outsiders."
To understand Grandma Moses in context, then, one
must return to her time and place. Were the circumstance of her fame
to be removed, she would fit most comfortably with the other
folk painters of that period, such as John Kane, Horace Pippin, and
Morris Hirshfield. Fame is a strange commodity, and it is sometimes
difficult to determine whether it is due more to luck or merit. Above
all, perhaps, Moses' posthumous reputation has suffered from the fact
that she was famous at a time when fame was considered unseemly for an
artist—before Andy Warhol decreed that all of us would be entitled to
our fifteen minutes.
Nonetheless, it is evident that Grandma Moses' fame
endured far longer than fifteen minutes. From the first Galerie St.
Etienne show in 1940 until her death in 1961, she enjoyed a career
that was as lengthy and rich as that of many a younger artist. And
while the cult of celebrity has naturally diminished since her death,
her work has endured. Today, over fifty years after Moses first burst
on the scene, it may safely be said that in her case, fame and
greatness were one.
