It Happened Here -- Grandma Moses, Her Life

 

Biographies of famous people often begin with a chapter on their childhood and lives leading up to the time they became famous. In the case of Anna Mary Robertson Moses this first chapter might be titled “the First 80 Years”

On Co. Rte 74A, outside of Greenwich

Anna Mary Robertson was born in 1860 into a family of ten children in Greenwich, New York. Not a wealthy family, the Robertsons struggled to keep their brood fed. At age twelve “Mary” became a “hired girl” and went to work cooking and house keeping and taking care of younger children at several farms around Eagle Bridge and Cambridge, receiving a sporadic basic education, in between domestic duties, in local one room schools. Anna Mary was courted by and married Thomas Salmon Moses a hired man, in 1887, and the couple left for North Carolina. Along the way they heard about the rich farmlands of the Shenandoah Valley and ended up settling near Staunton, Virginia, where they, in time, bought a farm. Life must not have been easy for Mary and her husband. Together they had ten children, but half of them were stillborn or died in infancy. And Thomas missed the northeast. In 1905 the family moved back and settled in Eagle Bridge, in the Hoosick River Valley, buying a dairy farm. At the children's urging, Mary named her farm, Mount Nebo after their first farm, named for the mountain where the biblical Moses looked down upon the promised land.

 

 

Black Angus cattle feed in front of barns at Grandma Moses' farm

Grandma Moses' Farm

 

 

If Eagle Bridge was a land of milk and honey, it was milk and honey that could only be purchased with a great deal of unremitting effort. Children and farm life kept Mary too busy to paint. Mary's mother had discouraged her artistic efforts as a child, encouraging her to make more practical uses of her time. 

  

                                                                  Will Moses, artist-great grandson of Anna Mary Robertson Moses 

    has his gallery in the barn at the right.

But her father painted and a few examples of his work have survived,  and Mary  continued to be attracted to painting. She created a landscape scene to decorate a fireplace board,  

a panel used to close off a fireplace in the summer months, in 1918, and she decorated a chair and an old tilt-top table, that would become her painting workspace. A cast off piece of threshing machine cover fabric drew her to try her hand at painting on canvass in 1927. When finally she did allow herself the luxury of artistic expression, after her children were grown, Mary began embroidering, creating scenes in worsted wool thread, in the early 1930's. Her paintings would continue to have an embroidered feel. But yarns faded and sagged in sunlight, and she became dissatisfied with needlework. Arthritis in her hands made embroidery difficult, as well.

By the late 1930's the Hoosick Valley grandmother was painting in oils and looking for venues to exhibit her work. She displayed some of her paintings at charity sales and local fairs. At the Cambridge (Washington County) fair she exhibited a few of them along with some jars of canned fruit and raspberry jam. She won prizes – for her canned fruit and raspberry jam! In 1937 Thomas' Pharmacy in Hoosick Falls invited her to to display her paintings in their window along with handicrafts other women in the community had made. For over a year a changing selection of her work was exhibited but remained unsold. Then, in the spring of 1938 Louis J. Caldor a civil engineer and amateur art collector on vacation with his wife happened upon the store window. At Caldor's request, the druggist assembled the whole lot of paintings, some twelve to fourteen pieces, painted on pressed board. Caldor bought them all. Obtaining her address, he visited her and encouraged her to keep painting, telling the astonished farmer's widow and grandmother of seventeen grandchildren, not to worry, that he would get her work shown in the art world of New York City. After about a month he sent her some regular artists supplies including canvass boards of various sizes and a selection of brushes including small ones so she wouldn't have to make her figures' eyes with the tip of a matchstick. 

For over a year Caldor worked his contacts until three of her paintings were selected for a Contemporary Museum of Modern Art's show, “Contemporary Unknown American Painters”. Though little immediately came of the exhibit, it was a beginning, and demonstrated the growing interest in “American Primitives,” or folk artists. A year later, Caldor met with Austrian emigre' Otto Kallir who, like Caldor was interested in finding authentic modern American art, not American imitations of European modernist trends. He organized for her a one woman show at his New York Galiere St. Etienne. He titled it simply, “What a Farm Wife Painted.” Though again, only a modest success – only three paintings were sold – it was reviewed in the New York papers, and Time Magazine, and it was well attended. Gimball's Department Store asked to repeat the exhibit for their “Thanksgiving Festival” promotion that fall, introducing 'Grandma Moses' to a wider audience. The Gimball's publicity department hyped the exhibit as “the biggest artistic rave since Currier and Ives” and they prevailed on her to open the exhibit addressing the public at the Gimball's auditorium. 'Grandma Moses' enchanted New Yorkers with her straight forward way of speaking and her down-home manner. Invitations to exhibit her work began to arrive, as did orders for her work.  In 1941 she won a “purchase prize” from the Syracuse Museum of Fine Art.

Louis Caldor liked to think of himself as the artist's agent, but the independent grandmother from Eagle Bridge was a difficult client. Though she was grateful to him, she produced the work and she was determined to sell it to whomever showed an interest in it, for the prices she set. “Paintings, she thought were not so different from butter and chickens. She set her price, sold them and was satisfied”.  Moses called the prices for her work at Otto Kallir's Gallery 'extortion prices' and when he sent her checks for her share of the sales she sometimes indignantly returned them. New Yorkers found that, once wartime gasoline rationing ended, Eagle Bridge made a nice excursion destination for a weekend trip. Local residents were usually willing to talk to outsiders about their local celebrity and give directions to her farm. There they would meet the artist, who was a delight to talk to, and either buy or order paintings from her . Song writer/impresario Cole Porter became a regular customer, ordering several paintings every year to give to friends around Christmas. By the mid 1940's two other dealer/exhibitors were vying for quantities of her works in addition to individuals seeking one or more pieces for themselves or friends.

Beginning in 1944 Otto Kallir staged a series of travelling exhibitions that introduced Grandma Moses work to smaller museums and local art associations across the county. In 1946 the Brundage greeting card company bought the rights to produce a Christmas collection of her winter landscapes, which were acquired by Hallmark Cards, the following year. These would be followed by licenses for drapery fabric, plates, and wall murals. But Moses drew the line at outright commercial-ization. (No farmer's wife would ever be seen in a kitchen in her paintings drinking Maxwell House Coffee, or would the Dutch Boy ever appear painting a fence or barn among the multitudes of busy rural folk.)

The Farmer's widow from Eagle Bridge, who had lived much of her life in the 19^th century, who painted scenes of traditional rural life, ironically, became the first American artist to gain national fame through the electronic media. In 1946 CBS radio put together a, then state-of-the-art, telephone link for a live radio broadcast interview with Grandma Moses from her farm in Eagle Bridge. It was followed in 1948 by a television segment featuring film clips and a live narration. In 1950 a TV documentary about her, narrated by Archibald MacLeish, was nominated for an Academy Award and two years, later actress Lilian Gish portrayed the artist in a dramatization of her autobiography, My Life's History. In a 1955 Edward R. Murrow TV interview some of her paintings were shown in what was one of the first applications of color television.

In 1949 Moses travelled to Washington to receive an award from President Truman. They hit it off immediately. He entertained her by playing the piano. “(He) is a country boy, like my own boys.” she said, and she suspected he liked cows. In 1956 Eisenhower's cabinet conspired with her to surprise the President with a Moses painting of his farm at Gettysburg, PA. Her 100^th birthday in 1960, became a national event, with her photograph featured on the cover of Life magazine. Eisenhower and vice-president Nixon paid tributes to her, as would President Kennedy, the following year. Governor Rockefeller proclaimed September 4^th, Grandma Moses Day.

What made the grandmother from Eagle Bridge, who liked to paint “pretty things”¹a nationally acclaimed – even internationally acclaimed artist?   Timing, undeniably played a significant role. In the later 1800's and early twentieth century a small number of “primitivists” made their niche in the contemporary art world. In France, Henri Rousseau was discovered and promoted by Pablo Picasso. In America, the tradition that carried forward from the itinerant limners of America's colonial past, was taken up by Edward Hicks and brought into the twentieth century by John Kane, Horace Pippin, Joseph Pickett and Morris Hirschfield. Anna Mary Moses was not enthralled to be known as a “primitivist” especially when some of her neighbors inquired if her family helped her read and respond to letters from her “fans,” but she endured the label with the same bemused patience that characterized much of her contact with the public and her response to “celebrity” status.

While collectors and critics in the American art world were searching for a truly American art that was not merely a reflection of the European modernists, the American public was looking for an art they could understand and identify with.

Contemporary abstract expressionism left most of them unimpressed and unengaged, but Moses work portrayed values of family and community which many Americans could embrace. And a Moses painting offered them a nostalgic look back into an idealized rural past that had changed more in the last four decades than it had in the previous two centuries. The Great Depression had brought foreclosure and abandonment of many family farms; the pressures of the marketplace forced consolidation and mechanization onto the survivors. Farming which had once been essentially a family and community enterprise, requiring many hands, now had many more solitary aspects. The farmer, behind the wheel of his tractor or combine, working alone, or essentially alone, with perhaps, one or two others in their machines became the reality of farming. But the farms of Grandma Moses paintings throb with community. The farmer plowing his field behind a team of horses, or scything his field of grain, works next to an orchard where children play, and another field where farm hands rake hay and load hay wagons, near farm houses where groups of women hang out wash and the hired man saws up firewood, while a wagon-load of neighbors come down the road for a visit. Of course, most realized this was an artistic fantasy that never existed, but in a century that had seen a great depression, two world wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation by mid century, it was a comforting fantasy that Americans were strongly attracted to.

Finally, there was Grandma Moses, herself. Through the media, America knew Grandma Moses as well as they knew her paintings. A woman who had lived through almost a century of hard work, frequent hardships, who had endured the deaths of many of her children, and her husband, as well, she remained defiantly positive, determined not to dwell on any sadness in her past. Americans liked that. Moses lived among the first generation of Americans who might look forward to a retirement and could contemplate artistic pursuits that had been deferred indefinitely or abandoned during their working lives. For these people she became a hero and a role model. And as she approached the end of her life she contemplated her passing with the same dogged optimism with which she lived her life, viewing with unquestioned faith her passing as an opportunity to be reunited with her family who had gone before her. And Americans liked that too.

 

 Family Monument of Anna Mary and Thomas Salmon Moses and one of their daughters

in Maple Grove Cemetery, Hoosic Falls

 

 

 

Marker of the Week

A reminder how quickly language changes. I have always seen entrenchments spelled with an "e", but "intrenchments" is a legitimate secondary spelling, according to Merriam-Webster, if not my spellcheck.  Cn U 4C the impac of txting!