Art people struggle when they have to discuss the works of famous artists. They don’t want to appear arrogant, and they likely have positive thoughts about increasing attendance at the museum. Plus, you never know how the pendulum will swing on these matters. In this bear market for art, one artist with an unexpected surge of interest at auctions is Bob Ross, the television illustrator of those “Happy Little Trees.” Just wait until kids on TikTok discover the work of Thomas Kinkade.
“Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is the institution’s attempt to pull Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961) from the greeting card shelf and return her to some controversy. Drawing on 33 works from SAAM’s decade-long private collection, curated by Leslie Umberger and Randall Griffey, this work makes Grandma Moses a prominent figure. This uneducated farmwife picked up a brush in her late 70s, and was 80 when the immigrant dealer Otto Kahler gave her her first show in 1940. She became the most famous American painter of her time—beloved by the public, marketed on cigarette boxes and Hallmark cards. She was snubbed by Clement Greenberg in New York, pitting her against Jackson Pollock for the title of Best Celebrity Artist and losing. Staged in Washington on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it depicts lives spanning from Lincoln to Kennedy as an example to the nation.
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“Grandma Moses: Good day’s work“ |
Maybe she was the kind of artist we deserve. It was very simple, after all. takes Calhoun (1955), which shows the Dudley Farm where the Moses family lived for eight years in Virginia, with the neighboring farm of the title across the road. In a green field drained of enthusiasm, 12 white farmhands are shown picking cotton and processing it using a modern-day gin. Moses and her husband went to the South in 1887 because there were no jobs after emancipation. Perhaps another artist has shaded some darker tones into this work, but there is no indication that these terrible men are working hard for the first time in their lives. Cotton emerges from the ground begging to be picked, while the farm’s beautiful trees and diverse homes conjure prosperity. This isn’t propaganda, it’s the way she and many people saw the world.
The topic may be similar in The farm (1952) but it has three dimensions and a different feel. It would mostly consist of rolling green hills, if it weren’t for the black holes in every building that grab your attention with their mystery. This most likely shows Selma, a Greek Renaissance plantation house she could see from her last plantation in Virginia, and whose owners reported a resident ghost, a Confederate soldier killed inside by a Yankee. Moses painted it for Harry Truman and gave it to him personally when he left office. “Truman is a country boy like my boys,” she said, the only person to authorize the use of nuclear weapons twice.
Yes, she may have known more than she let on. Fire in the forest (c. 1940) is a wonderfully expressive take on the subject. She captures the chaos of the event through detailed attention to the different types of fire, the orange that licks the bushes, and the blood red that consumes the blocks of rock. She pays no less attention to the types of smoke. It’s some of her best work, and great for not having people in it. She might have been more universally admired if she had built her career drawing big, angry trees.
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