Grandma Moses In The 21st Century

Udgivet i forbindelse med udstillinger i The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. og seks andre museer mellem 15. marts 2001 og 1. december 2002

"In this book Karal Ann Marling looks at Grandma Moses as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period and explores the meaning of her subject matter - and her astonishing fame. What did the "Greatest Generation" see in her simple renderings of people, young and old, tapping maple trees for syrup, making apple butter, gliding across snowy fields on sleighs? Why did Bob Hope, Irving Berlin, and Harry Truman all love her - and the art czars' of New York openly despise her? Through the flood of Moses merchandise - splashed across Christmas cards, dishware, yard goods, and gewgaws of every kind - Marling traces the resonances that these "primitive" images struck in an America awkwardly adjusting to a new era of technology, suburbia, and Cold War tensions.".

After World War I, artists without formal training “crashed the gates” of major museums in the United States, diversifying the art world across lines of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender. At the center of this fundamental reevaluation of who could be an artist in America were John Kane, Horace Pippin, and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses. The stories of these three artists not only intertwine with the major critical debates of their period but also prefigure the call for inclusion in representations of American art today. In Gatecrashers, Katherine Jentleson offers a valuable corrective to the history of twentieth-century art by expanding narratives of interwar American modernism and providing an origin story for contemporary fascination with self-taught artists.

A long-overdue reexamination of beloved American artist Grandma Moses, restoring her rightful place within the canon of mid-century American Art. One of the best-known artists of her time, and a true American legend, Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860–1961) was often marginalized as a latter-day "folk" painter or a phenomenon of popular media. Accompanying a traveling exhibition, this new book looks closely at the paintings themselves and the artist’s compelling biography to reassert her role in the development of a culture of modernist art at mid-century. Presenting fresh research, several scholars examine Moses’s name, public persona, painted world, and wildly popular place in American pop culture; address the myth of the self-taught artist; and contextualize her work alongside such contemporaries as Horace Pippin, Elie Nadelman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Morris Hirshfield.

Self-taught American folk artist Anna Mary Moses became a painter late in life after working on farms in New York and Virginia. This biography introduces the rural childhood, family life, early yarn pictures, discovery by Louis J. Caldor, first exhibition at Otto Kallir's gallery, Hallmark Christmas cards, documentary interview by Edward R. Murrow, illustration of Clement C. Moore's "The Night Before Christmas," and primitive style of the woman who would become Grandma Moses. Sidebars, a glossary, an index, and a phonetics section accompany easy-to-read text and full-color reproductions of Moses's artwork, including Taking in Laundry, Deep Snow, The Old Automobile, and The Eisenhower Home.

This biography briefly examines the life and work of the twentieth-century American painter, describing and giving examples of her art.