Artists struggle when they have to discuss the work of famous artists. They don’t want to come off as snobs, and they probably have good thoughts about increasing museum attendance. Again, you never know how the pendulum will swing on these issues. In this bear art market, one of the artists who will be of unexpected interest at auction is Bob Ross, the television artist of those “happy little trees.” Wait until the kids on TikTok discover Thomas Kinkade’s work.
“Grandmother Moses: A Good Day’s Work” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum bids to pull Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961) out of the greeting card scene and back into other conflicts. Based on 33 works from SAAM’s ten-year collecting competition and organized by Leslie Umberger and Randall Griffey, it places the case with Grandma Moses as the winner. Here is an uneducated farmer who picked up a brush in the late 70s, he was 80 when the émigré salesman Otto Kallir gave him the first show in 1940. She became the most famous American female artist of her day—worshipped by the public, sold on cigarette tins and Hallmark cards. He was scorned by Clement Greenberg’s New York, which pitted him against Jackson Pollock for the title of top celebrity artist and lost. Organized in Washington in opposition to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it organizes a lifetime from Lincoln to Kennedy as a national icon.
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“Grandmother Moses: A Good Day’s Work” |
Maybe he was just the right kind of artist for us. He was simple, after all. Take it Calhoun (1955), which shows the Dudley farmhouse where the Moseses lived for eight years in Virginia, and the neighboring farm of the subject across the street. In a dull green field it shows 12 white farm people picking and processing cotton in the latest model jeans. Moses and her husband went south in 1887 because there were jobs to be found after the liberation. Another artist may have done something dark in this work, but there is little to show that these formidable men are working hard for the first time in their lives. Cotton comes out of the ground begging to be picked, while beautiful trees and various farm houses combine prosperity. This is not propaganda, it is the way he and many people see the world.
The subject may be similar to Platation (1952) but it has three lengths and a different feel. It would be mostly made of green hills, if it weren’t for the black holes in each building that draw your eye with their mystery. This shows that Selma, the Greek Revival house he saw on his last farm in Virginia, whose owners reported a ghost living there, a Confederate soldier who was killed inside a Yankee. Moses painted Harry Truman and personally gave it to him when he left office. “Truman is a country boy like my boys,” he said, of the one person who authorized the use of nuclear weapons, twice.
Yes, he may have known more than he let on. A Fire in the Forest (c. 1940) is a remarkable, rhetorical take on the subject. He captures the chaos of the event with detailed attention to the different types of fire, orange licking the grass, red blood devouring the monoliths. Pay attention to the types of smoke. One of his best works, and notable for his work with no people in it. Perhaps he would have been more popular around the world if he had built his career on painting giant angry trees.
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