“Her primitive paintings captured the spirit and preserved the scene of a vanishing countryside.” So reads the epitaph of American artist Grandma Moses (aka Anna Mary Robertson Moses), whose lifetime remarkably stretched from the Civil War to the Kennedy administration. A self-taught artist who didn’t start painting until her late 70s, Moses created scenes of a bygone American era that were treasured by the public yet kept at a distance by the art establishment. In the 1,500-plus works that she painted, mostly between the late 1930s and her death in 1961, Moses fused her personal experiences with national history and created soothingly nostalgic views of America.
She was dubbed “Grandma” by audiences that were quick to embrace her and found comfort in this matronly, salt-of-the-earth figure during times of great change, which included World War II, the Cold War, and the civil rights era. After a quiet life raising five children on a farm and running a successful butter-making business, Grandma Moses became a media sensation, her fame controversially surpassing that of other female artists of the time.
Currently on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., is a major Moses retrospective that aims to elevate her distinctive place within American art. Curated by Leslie Umberger and Randall R. Griffey, it features 88 artworks (including a substantial 33 from the museum’s collection) created between the late 1930s and the year of the artist’s death at age 101, in 1961. With that show on view through mid-July before traveling to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, in September, here is a guide to six key works in the exhibition.
