Grandma Moses' paintings are simply captivating

PORTLAND — In 1949, when Life magazine published a daring spread on the little-known abstract painter Jackson Pollock, a headline posed the question: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" One art historian, writing for the catalog of a new show at Portland Art Museum, thinks that for most Americans the answer would have been: "No, Grandma Moses is."

Grandma Moses?

Well, "the greatest" is surely an overstatement, but Grandma Moses probably was the most popular painter of the time. PAM's delightful retrospective of work by the self-taught artist makes it easy enough to see why people have long been smitten by her. That includes politicians, businessmen, the press, art collectors and museum curators, though perhaps for different reasons.

On the heels of World War II, Grandma Moses was the kind of feel-good story everyone wanted to cash in on. She became a celebrity of sorts, appearing on television talk shows and receiving an award from President Truman. The reproduction rights to her images were licensed and sold for all kinds of products from drapery fabric to collector plates. Early on, the Hallmark company began printing Grandma Moses greeting cards. According to the exhibit catalog, by Moses' death in 1961 (at age 101), over 100 million of her greeting cards had been exchanged.

That sort of commercialism can be troublesome to art historians, although it's hard to understand why in this post-Andy Warhol era. Several catalog essayists wrestle with issues of "high art" versus "low art" and how to reconcile Grandma Moses' popular success with the art-historical stature that museum exhibitions require. How does folk art fit into all the 20th-century art "isms"? And, of course, there's the problem of her being a woman: Why haven't feminist critics addressed her work?

If such things pique your interest, get the catalog. But the best way to appreciate Grandma Moses is to forget all that, walk in and look at the pictures.

First, though, for those who were born too late to recall the Grandma Moses phenomenon, a quick recap of her story. Right from the start, a big part of Moses' appeal lay in who she was.

Her story

Grandma Moses was born Anna Mary Robertson in 1860 on an upstate New York farm. Her father was a farmer who painted as a hobby, and as a child Anna learned to use berry juice to make pictures. At age 12, her family hired her out as a servant, and she continued working until she married farmer Thomas Moses when she was 27. Mary gave birth to 10 children, only five of whom survived infancy.

After her husband's death, and with her children grown, Mary — by then known to her family and friends as Grandma Moses — began embroidering landscape scenes to stay busy. When arthritis made it difficult to continue, she switched to paint. She once told an interviewer, "I had always wanted to paint, I just didn't have time until I was 78."

In "Grandma Moses in the 21st Century" the first pieces in the exhibit show her awkward transition from needle to brush. Moses had plenty of skill embroidering, so she took her technique straight to canvas, which results in the paintings looking like needlework or paint by numbers. That's because she didn't mix colors together for shading, but just put down one color next to another, as if they were stitched in embroidery thread. She also practiced her brushwork by painting on top of prints by other artists, or copying scenes she saw in magazines.

Perspective of a long life

Eventually, though, she began to work straight from her own long experience, painting the rituals of farm life and the moods of the New England landscape. One of her relatively early paintings that shows tremendous sophistication is "Black Horses" (1942). It made me wonder how much of her sense of composition was innate and how much she developed from looking and reading about painting.

Wherever it came from, the composition of "Black Horses" is captivating. The energy of the painting is divided between two black horses running free on one side and a single, sedate brown horse carrying two riders on the other. I like the way all the motion in the painting happens at the bottom, on the slim area of foreground that we look down upon, and the way the placid patchwork of countryside — farmland and forest, country lanes and meandering river — spreads and rises in the distance. All that intensity of life and land finally evaporates into a pinkish haze of sky barely powdered with blue. The color of the sky says a lot. It came from precise observation and a strong appreciation of color and mood, not from a preset notion of "sky blue."

There's a lovely sense of balance in Moses' work, a sense of the big picture — not just a panoramic view of the landscape, for which she is known, but the perspective of a long, hardworking life. In a Grandma Moses painting, landscape is meaning, not just prettiness. Each shift of weather has a result in the day's activities, each season has a rhythm to be respected.

When a late summer thunderstorm hits, the hay has to be rushed to the barn, the laundry brought in. At Thanksgiving, a turkey must be killed. These are the subjects Moses painted, and she only falters when she steps away from what she knows. In this show, a lackluster picture of reindeer on the roof is the result of someone wanting her to illustrate "The Night Before Christmas." She shouldn't have done it.

It's a perfect stroke for the Grandma Moses legend that the last painting she finished, just before her death, was "Rainbow," an autumn harvest scene with laborers scything in the field and a pink, yellow and white rainbow hanging over the land. A double rainbow starts from it, arcing up outside the picture to end in a place we cannot see.

Here was a painter who broke all stereotypes of what an artist should be, who began to paint purely for the pleasure it brought her and continued doing it for the pleasure it gave. Even at 101, she clearly had a hard time giving that up.