DOCSLIB.ORG

Grandma Moses: American Modern

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Grandma Moses: American Modern Grandma Moses: American Modern So you think you know Grandma Moses? Little old lady who began painting folk pictures of country life at the age of 78 and then became the most famous artist in America. Would you ever associate her name with Modernism? Yet the same people who embraced Modernism in America in the 1930s and 40s were also collecting folk art. It was at this time that curators and collectors began to make connections between what they called the “American Primitives” and the most advanced contemporary art. In fact, the first public exhibition of Grandma Moses’s paintings was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, and was organized by Sidney Janis, who later became famous as the gallerist who represented Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Surprising! Bennington Museum is home to the largest public collection of paintings by Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860‐1961). Better known as Grandma Moses, the artist was catapulted to international fame during the 1940s as the result of her charming, naïvely executed paintings of rural American farm life. But she was so much more than a homespun folk hero. The popular view is that she simply painted scenes remembered from her childhood. In fact, she was a highly skilled artist who refined her art through practice and created a unique world of her own imagining. She combined multiple perspectives in the same painting and used collage and popular imagery, unconsciously paralleling the techniques of Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art. Grandma Moses: American Modern, on view at the Bennington Museum, its final venue, July 1 through November 5, has a subversive goal, for it will upset your expectations and get you to look at this beloved American artist with fresh eyes. It is a long‐overdue exhibition that will reestablish her place in the mid‐century art world that was embracing modern art at the same time. By putting her paintings side‐by‐side with works by such iconic Modernists as Joseph Cornell, Helen Frankenthaler, Fernand Léger, and Andy Warhol, and folk artists such as Edward Hicks and Joseph Pickett, the exhibition allows visitors to discover for themselves how all these artists drew on found images, color, collage, memory, and their own innate artistic sensibility to create original masterpieces. Like any trained artist, Moses used thought, planning, and intuition to create works of enormous vitality and imagination. Memory, Imagination, Clippings, Collages, and Commercialism Creating detailed depictions of seasonal activities, Moses came to be especially associated with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. A perfect example of that is Catchin’ The Turkey, 1955. While the finished product feels like a seamless, cohesive whole, Moses’s paintings such as this are actually patchworks of borrowed sources (newspaper and magazine clippings), often pulled completely out of context, and the artist’s own memories and associations. “Moses surely had strong memories of the annual ritual of catching the turkey for her family’s Thanksgiving meal, as she repeated this subject well over a dozen times throughout her career. However, as with all her paintings, what seems like a vividly recalled personal memory is in fact a carefully constructed image ripe with nostalgic associations,” states Jamie Franklin, Curator at the Bennington Museum. Moses wrote of her painting practice, “I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.” Working in a similar fashion, Helen Frankenthaler also held the landscape inside herself and let it pour out, literally in her case, splashing thinned oil paints directly from a coffee can onto a canvas on the floor as she created works such as Silver Coast, 1958. Describing the creation, Frankenthaler recalled, “Though it was painted in her studio, far from the motif, the memory of the landscape is in the painting.” Moses’s technique of compiling multiple unrelated clippings into distinct new images echoes the practice of Joseph Cornell, another of America’s best‐known self‐taught artists of the mid‐ twentieth century, now widely recognized as an important Modernist. In Moses’s Catchin’ the Turkey, the boy running in pinwheel fashion was traced from a figure in John Falter’s Saturday Evening Post cover painting Evening Picnic, where the boy was actually frolicking with other children. Moses had a knack for finding images of figures that powerfully convey abstract visual information via posture and body language. Once found, certain figures would be used multiple times. These images were traced from clippings she kept in a large painted trunk that she would riffle through to find inspiration. Unrelated clippings were assembled to create new images, collages designed in her imagination. “It is impossible to say exactly what percentage of the artist's paintings are based on her voluminous collection of clippings, but given the surviving evidence it is safe to say that the majority of her figures, animals, buildings and even a large percentage of her landscape elements were directly traced or adapted in some way, shape, or form from pre‐existing imagery,” states Franklin. Like Moses, Cornell was astoundingly inventive in his use of found sources, often repurposing a favored image again and again, sometimes decades apart. Cornell kept his source materials of clippings, paper ephemera, and other found materials filed in his basement studio in some 150 loosely categorized, highly personal dossiers. His untitled collage of ca. 1965 shows his habit of melding disparate found materials into highly evocative, surrealist images, this one a landscape populated by birds, a doll, a sculptural figure, and a boat. “Moses’s painting technique was grounded in a collage aesthetic and she was well versed in needlework of all types. In addition to beginning her artistic career making embroidered pictures, which played a significant role in the development of her iconic painting style, Moses also made pieced quilts and rag dolls. Her painting The Quilting Bee emphasizes the domestic, communal, female‐dominated nature of this quintessential nineteenth‐century tradition,” states Franklin. Miriam Schapiro was one of the foremost exponents of Femmage, a feminist art movement of the 1970s that involved reviving materials, techniques and processes historically associated with traditional women’s art. Schapiro’s fabric painting Patience, 1976, is a perfect complement to The Quilting Bee, with its fabric ground in a traditional honeycomb quilt pattern centered by a vintage apron, a powerful symbol of women’s domestic servitude that has been collaged to the surface of the image, and the motto “patience” painted above. As a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, Andy Warhol had the same appetite as Moses for adapting his imagery from popular printed sources. An exhibition of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can paintings at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962 catapulted the artist to fame in the “fine art” realm and the images went on to become icons of Pop Art. In 1964 he took a reproduction in a photography magazine and adapted it to make Flowers, another icon of Pop Art. “Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup is from a portfolio of ten soup can prints Andy Warhol editioned in 1968 and Flowers is from a print edition he made in 1970. Both are screen prints, a commercial process often used for mass production. So they show how he used commercial imagery that was converted into fine art and then back, in a way, to a commercial product again. The same process could be used to describe Moses’s own work and its subsequent public reception. She borrowed from popular commercial imagery, created original paintings based on it, and then the paintings were turned back into commercial products, such as curtains, plates, greeting cards and prints, to be consumed by the masses,” states Franklin. Grandma Moses: American Modern is on view at Bennington Museum, its final venue, July 1 through November 5. The exhibition was organized by Shelburne Museum and Bennington Museum, and combines their two great collections of the painter’s work, supplemented with key loans from private collections arranged by Galerie St. Etienne of New York City. Bennington Museum augments this exhibition with over 20 additional masterpieces on loan from public and private collections on view in the museum’s permanent Grandma Moses Gallery. The result is an almost unprecedented opportunity to see more than 60 works by this colorful American painter throughout three galleries, the largest group of works by Moses assembled in decades. Grandma Moses: American Modern is accompanied by a scholarly, fully illustrated catalogue that features essays by Jamie Franklin, curator of Bennington Museum, Alexander Nemerov, professor of Art History at Stanford University, Diana Korzenik, professor emerita at the Massachusetts College of Art, and Thomas Denenberg, director of Shelburne Museum. The exhibition at Bennington Museum is supported by Bennington Potters and The Bank of Bennington. .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Miriam Schapiro's Enduring Legacy Is on Full View at the Museum
    Artnews 24 April 2018 Beyond the Surface: Miriam Schapiro’s Enduring Legacy Is on Full View at the Museum of Arts and Design By Claire Selvin http://www.artnews.com/2018/04/24/beyond-surface-miriam-schapiros-enduring-legacy-full-view-museum-arts-design/ ! In a 1989 interview, the artist Miriam Schapiro discussed her admiration for “heroines” like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Frida Kahlo. Noting their rather fraught lives, she said “that doesn’t stop you from expressing your point of view in whatever manner you choose to do it.” In the 1970s, Schapiro herself chose to make craft works that she termed “femmages” (a portmanteau of “feminine” and “collage”), which staked a claim for women, both in the art world and outside it, by centering the home as a site of resilience and subversion. And she certainly lived by these principles of resistance, deliberately situating her practice against artistic norms of her day. For years, Schapiro’s work was relegated to relative obscurity compared with that of many of her male contemporaries. But since her death in 2015, and following a retrospective at the National Academy Museum in New York the year after, her art has been reappraised, and is a key inspiration for a number of artists working today. A new exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, “Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro,” offers an vigorous look at the feminist pioneer’s work, placing it alongside pieces by nine contemporary artists and a selection of personal objects from the Schapiro estate.
    [Show full text]
  • Art Masterpiece: “Checkered House in Winter” By: Grandma Moses
    Art Masterpiece: “Checkered House in Winter” By: Grandma Moses Artist: Grandma Moses (1860-1961) Keywords: Scene, Foreground, Background, Folk Art Grade: 1st Concept: Group Mural Project Lesson Activity: Create a snowy village scene using crayons and cotton balls Meet The Artist: Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma Moses) was the third child born into the Robertson family in 1860. Her parents were farmers and money was scarce. When Anna was 12 she became a “hired girl” to help another family. When it was cold in the winter little girls did not attend school very often, but when she was working as a hired girl she was allowed to attend school with her employer's children where she learned to read and write. She was a very hard worker and enjoyed the opportunity to go to school. When she was in her 20's she married Thomas Salmon Moses who was also a hired worker. The couple moved to Virginia where they rented farms and worked the land. They had five children and eventually returned to New York state and bought a farm. At this time she was called Mother Moses. She could do many things and enjoyed needlework such as sewing and embroidering and would make pictures on the fabric with her needle & thread. She slowly developed arthritis and as she got older it became more difficult to push the needle through the fabric. When she was in her late seventies she decided to take up painting which was easier on her hands. Her first painting was made using housepaint! She painted simple picture scenes of family, farm life, and community extolling the virtues of honesty and hard work which made America great.
    [Show full text]
  • Dear Sister Artist: Activating Feminist Art Letters and Ephemera in the Archive
    Article Dear Sister Artist: Activating Feminist Art Letters and Ephemera in the Archive Kathy Carbone ABSTRACT The 1970s Feminist Art movement continues to serve as fertile ground for contemporary feminist inquiry, knowledge sharing, and art practice. The CalArts Feminist Art Program (1971–1975) played an influential role in this movement and today, traces of the Feminist Art Program reside in the CalArts Institute Archives’ Feminist Art Materials Collection. Through a series of short interrelated archives stories, this paper explores some of the ways in which women responded to and engaged the Collection, especially a series of letters, for feminist projects at CalArts and the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London over the period of one year (2017–2018). The paper contemplates the archive as a conduit and locus for current day feminist identifications, meaning- making, exchange, and resistance and argues that activating and sharing—caring for—the archive’s feminist art histories is a crucial thing to be done: it is feminism-in-action that not only keeps this work on the table but it can also give strength and definition to being a feminist and an artist. Carbone, Kathy. “Dear Sister Artist,” in “Radical Empathy in Archival Practice,” eds. Elvia Arroyo- Ramirez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O’Neill, and Holly Smith. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3. ISSN: 2572-1364 INTRODUCTION The 1970s Feminist Art movement continues to serve as fertile ground for contemporary feminist inquiry, knowledge sharing, and art practice. The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program, which ran from 1971 through 1975, played an influential role in this movement and today, traces and remains of this pioneering program reside in the CalArts Institute Archives’ Feminist Art Materials Collection (henceforth the “Collection”).
    [Show full text]
  • THE MARY H. DANA WOMEN ARTISTS SERIES: from Idea to Institution
    4 THE JOURNAL OF THE THE MARY H. DANA WOMEN ARTISTS SERIES: From Idea to Institution BY BERYL K. SMITH Ms. Smith is Librarian at the Rutgers University Art Library During the 1960s, women began to identify and admit that social, political, and cultural inequities existed, and to seek redress. In 1966, a structural solidarity took shape with the founding of NOW (National Organization for Women). Women artists, sympathetic to the aims of this movement, recog- nized the need for a coalition with a more specific direction, and, at the height of the women's movement, several groups were formed that uniquely focused on issues of concern to women artists. In 1969 W.A.R. (Women Artists in Revolution) grew out of the Art Worker's Coalition, an anti- establishment group. In 1970 the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee was formed, initially to increase the representation of women in the Whitney Museum annuals but later a more broad-based purpose of political and legal action and a program of regular discussions was adopted. Across the country, women artists were organizing in consciousness-raising sessions, joining hands in support groups, and picketing and protesting for the relief of injustices that they felt were rampant in the male-dominated art world. In January 1971, Linda Nochlin answered the question she posed in her now famous and widely cited article, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Nochlin maintained that the exclusion of women from social and cultural institutions was the root cause that created a kind of cultural malnourishment of women.1 In June 1971, a new unity led the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists to threaten to sue the Los Angeles County Museum for discrimination.2 That same year, at Cal Arts (California In- stitute of the Arts) Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro developed the first women's art program in the nation.3 These bicoastal activities illustrate merely the high points of the women's art movement, forming an historical framework and providing the emotional climate for the beginning of the Women Artists Series at Douglass College.
    [Show full text]
  • WOMANHOUSE Intimacy, Identity and Domesticity
    WOMANHOUSE Intimacy, Identity and Domesticity Susana Solís-Zara1 University of Sevilha 1. Introduction This text examines the issue of art and intimacy, and its strong connection with the concept of identity: and especially representations of female identity in the collaborative feminist art installation, perfor- mance space, exhibition and pedagogical project Womanhouse (Janu- art exhibition, coinciding with the foundation of feminist art criticism at the beginning of the seventies in the United States . The Project Womanhouse was a collaborative project that deals with women’s gender experiences within the context of a real house 1. Susana Solís-Zara https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9932-9452 Universidad de Sevilla Departamento de Educación Artística, Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación Calle Pirotecnia s/n. CP. 41013 (Sevilla), Spain. [email protected] 298 Susana Solís-Zara setting in an urban neighbourhood in Los Angeles (http://www.wom- anhouse.net/). It presented and exhibited feminist artistic proposals concerning subjective identity, gender and intimacy like the ones found in domestic spaces. It includes perspectives such as the home as a space for both intimacy and identity, the body-house-home relationship, as- pects of maternity and the dichotomy between the private and the pub- lic, all of which continue to be narratives in contemporary women’s art. The main object of this essay is therefore to analyse the Woman- house project, as well as to examine some of its most prominent art- works and how intimacy was used as a means of expression, bringing - tion. It is precisely women who developed the notion of intimacy, as their role in history has been one of marginality and invisibility, being - WOMANHOUSE: Intimacy, Identity and Domesticity 299 2.
    [Show full text]
  • Judy Chicago
    Judy Chicago Born 1939, Chicago, IL 1962, BA University of California, Los Angeles, CA 1964, MA University of California, Los Angeles, CA 1992, Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, Russell Sage College, Troy, NY 2000, Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, Smith College, Northampton, MA 2000, Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 2003, Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, Duke University, Durham, NC 2010, Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, OH Lives and works in Belen, NM Solo exhibitions 2019 The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, Nation Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC 2018 Born Again: Judy Chicago’s Birth Project, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA 2017 Judy Chicago’s Pussies, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA PowerPlay, Salon 94, New York, NY The Roots of “The Dinner Party,” Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY 2016 Judy Chicago’s Birth Project: Born Again, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, FL. Traveling to Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA; University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO; St. Catherine University, St. Paul, MN; Pasadena Museum of Art, Pasadena, CA Judy Chicago: Fire Works, Cressman Center Gallery, Louisville, KY Why Not Judy Chicago?, curated by Xabier Arakistain, Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, Spain; traveling to CAPC Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France 2015 Star Cunts and Other Images, Riflemaker, London, United Kingdom 2014 Surveying Judy Chicago: 1970 – 2014, RedLine, Denver, CO Judy Chicago’s Feminist Pedagogy and Alternative Spaces, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Heads Up, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Local Color: Judy Chicago in New Mexico 1984 – 2014, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM Judy Chicago: A Butterfly for Oakland, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY The Very Best of Judy Chicago.
    [Show full text]
  • SUZANNE LACY, FEMINISM and QUILTING by JACQUELINE
    EVER PRESENT, NEVER PRESENTED: SUZANNE LACY, FEMINISM AND QUILTING by JACQUELINE WITKOWSKI B.A. (Hons), DePaul University, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Art History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) September 2014 © Jacqueline Witkowski, 2014 Abstract Seated at tables of four, over four hundred women aged 55-95 years old unfold tablecloths of yellow, red, and black. With their choreographed and synchronized gesturing hands, they mimic traditional Euro-American quilt patterns. This performance, titled The Crystal Quilt, was produced by Los Angeles-based artist Suzanne Lacy in 1987 as the culminating work to the two- year long, statewide initiative Whisper Minnesota (1985-1987). There is a continued resonance of the quilt in Lacy’s oeuvre, as The Crystal Quilt was the third project to reference quilts and quilt making. The first project, Evalina and I: Crimes, Quilts, Art (1975-78), and a smaller commemorative project (1980), employed tactile quilting projects instead of the conceptual quilt arrangement that Lacy would incorporate in 1987. The formal and historical attributes of this textile practice have been largely ignored in contemporary scholarship on the artist, thus raising the question of how this very specific medium encouraged her artistic and activist agenda. The primary focus of this thesis is an exploration of how Lacy mediates these two approaches, one of feminism and the other inspired by conceptual artist Allan Kaprow, through the medium of the quilt. Neither Lacy’s quilt works nor the use of craft during the second wave feminist movement has been sufficiently analyzed within craft scholarship.
    [Show full text]
  • Dear Friend and Fellow History Buff
    PLEASE PRING THESE ENTIRE FIVE PAGES. THE LAST TWO PAGES MUST BE MAILED IN TO SECURE YOUR RESERVATION. Dear Friend and Fellow History Buff: We’ve saved the best for last. Autumnal New England. Glorious fall foliage, the colors splashed against mountain ranges carpeted by hickory, maple, and the sweet gum. The days are warm – most of the time – the evening air is crisp — and the landscape dotted with villages as stylized as a Grandma Moses painting. Which reminds me: among half a dozen places we’ve never visited before is the acclaimed Bennington Museum, home to the world’s largest collection of Moses’ work. It’s just one of the sites that make this fall’s “A Presidential Tour of New York, New England & the Hudson Valley” (October 1 – 10, 2016) a combination of old favorites and such first-time attractions as Washington Irving’s Sunnyside estate; the newly renovated FDR Library and Museum; the Ground Zero Memorial and 9/11 Memorial Museum; and the Concord Museum, home to an original Paul Revere lantern, not to mention Emerson’s study and the contents of Thoreau’s famous cabin at nearby Walden Pond. I needn’t remind you that our hotels – most booked for two or even three night stays – are the cream of the crop. Likewise, we’ll be dining at such celebrated institutions as Sylvia’s Soul Food in Harlem, Boston’s Union Oyster House (JFK’s favorite), the world-famous Culinary Institute of America, and the legendary Durgin Park in the shadow of a teaming Quincy Market (we’ve been careful to set aside free time in Boston to allow those so inclined to shop till they drop).
    [Show full text]
  • Decorative Artists of Orlando Membership Application for 2020 Decorative Artists of Orlando - an Affiliated Chapter of the Society of Decorative Painters
    DECORATIVE ARTISTS OF ORLANDO SEPTEMBER 2020 NEWSLETTER CHAPTER WEBSITE: www.decorativeartistsorlando.wordpress.com CHAPTER MEETINGS ARE CANCELLED THROUGH th DECEMBER 31, 2020 September 7 American Legion Post #243 Labor Day 491 W. Broadway St – Oviedo, FL 32765 PLEASE STAY TUNED FOR AN UPDATE REGARDING THE JANUARY 2021 MEETING We hope all members, friends, and loved ones remain healthy and safe! ~ “Labor Day 1909” by Bob Pettes September Birthdays 4th – Barbara Fowler 7th – Greg Case 11th – Pam Richards 13th – Adriana Young rd 23 – Penny Brown “Green Heron Near the Lighthouse,” Sanibel Island, FL. 29th – Sherry Siercks ~ Photo by Greg Case, May 2020 30th – Evette Appleby PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE “Count your life by smiles, Your board members have been busy with some ideas for not tears. Count your age 2020 and we need your vote to approve or give feedback if it by friends, not years. there is something you do not agree with. There is a ballot to com- plete and can be mailed or e-mailed to Greg and Dianne. Greg has Happy birthday!” typed up the questions for you to vote on. One of the questions is about the local chapter dues being waived for 2020, and was a sug- gestion made to us by Alise Duerr. Thank you Alise; the Board agreed. Coming Birthdays - October It has been suggested we publish the I certainly have been missing our monthly chapter meetings and next month’s birthdays for those who workshops. I hope all are doing well and staying busy with at least like to plan ahead and craft cards! some of what you love.
    [Show full text]
  • “Grandma Moses” Born Easton, New York, 1860; Died Hoosick Falls, New York, 1961
    Grandma Moses Portrait of Grandma Moses Haying Time The Artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses “Grandma Moses” Born Easton, New York, 1860; died Hoosick Falls, New York, 1961. Grandma Moses was born the third of ten children in her family on a rural farm in New York. At the age of 12, she left her family’s farm, and went to work as hired help at a neighboring farm. She married Thomas Moses at 27 and worked as a farm wife in Virginia. She had ten children, five of whom survived past infancy. She helped to support her family by selling various homemade foods from her home. Grandma Moses did not begin painting until she was 78 years old, and was never trained as an artist. She began painting to keep herself occupied when she became arthritic, and could no longer enjoy the needlework she had once been able to do. Louis J. Caldor, a New York collector, discovered Moses’ painting in the window of a drug store. He showed her work to an art dealer named Otto Kallier, and he gave Moses her own exhibit in New York City. Her paintings soon became very popular, and she was well known throughout the world. Grandma Moses painted until a few months before her death at age 101. Art Movement Folk Art Folk Art does not come out of the fine art tradition. Folk artists are typically from rural or pre-industrial societies, and are more closely related to craftsmen than they are to fine artists. Generally, artists of this style have little to no formal training in art.
    [Show full text]
  • Grandma Moses: American Modern” Is on View at Shelburne “The Old Checkered House, 1853,” 1944
    GRANDMA MOSES American Modern By Jessica Skwire Routhier “Catching the Turkey,” 1955. Oil on pressed wood, 12 by 16 inches;. SHELBURNE, VT. — Context may not be everything when it comes to approaching and understanding the art of Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, but it matters a lot. The latest contribution to the somewhat crowded field of Moses retrospectives is a studied attempt to articulate more completely the context in which her work was made and perceived in the 1940s and 1950s. Both the exhibition and the catalog take the bold step of presenting Moses’s work alongside that of her Modernist contemporaries, arguing persuasively that she was less the “naïve” autodidact she is often thought to be and more fully a participant in the construction of American Modernism. “Grandma Moses: American Modern” is on view at Shelburne “The Old Checkered House, 1853,” 1944. Oil on pressed wood, 20¾ by 28 inches; Museum through October 30 and will travel to the Bennington Bennington Museum. Museum in 2017. By now the story of Moses’s “discovery” and rise to fame is familiar. She lived most of her life on a farm in rural Green Point, N.Y., near the Vermont border, and began painting in earnest in her seventies, after the death of her husband. In 1939, her paintings, on view in the “women’s exchange” area of a local drugstore, caught the attention of a New York-based folk art collector. In an astonishingly brief period of time she was exhibiting at the Museum of Modern Art, licensing images with Hallmark, appearing frequently on nationally televised broadcasts and becoming a household name — enough so that Spencer Tracy, in the 1945 film Adam’s Rib, could tease Katharine Hepburn that her new hat made her look “kinda like Grandma Moses.” “To go from unknown to being name-dropped by Hollywood within the space of just a few short years,” says exhibition co-curator and Bennington Museum curator Jamie Franklin, “is pretty indicative of how much of a phenomenon she was and how quickly that happened.” And yet it was not immediate.
    [Show full text]
  • Postwar Abstraction in the Hamptons August 4 - September 23, 2018 Opening Reception: Saturday, August 4, 5-8Pm 4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, New York 11937
    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Montauk Highway II: Postwar Abstraction in the Hamptons August 4 - September 23, 2018 Opening Reception: Saturday, August 4, 5-8pm 4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, New York 11937 Panel Discussion: Saturday, August 11th, 4 PM with Barbara Rose, Lana Jokel, and Gail Levin; moderated by Jennifer Samet Mary Abbott | Stephen Antonakos | Lee Bontecou | James Brooks | Nicolas Carone | Giorgio Cavallon Elaine de Kooning | Willem de Kooning | Fridel Dzubas | Herbert Ferber | Al Held | Perle Fine Paul Jenkins | Howard Kanovitz | Lee Krasner | Ibram Lassaw | Michael Lekakis | Conrad Marca-Relli Peter Moore |Robert Motherwell | Costantino Nivola | Alfonso Ossorio | Ray Parker | Philip Pavia Milton Resnick | James Rosati | Miriam Schapiro | Alan Shields | David Slivka | Saul Steinberg Jack Tworkov | Tony Vaccaro | Esteban Vicente | Wilfrid Zogbaum EAST HAMPTON, NY: Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Montauk Highway II: Postwar Abstraction in the Hamptons, opening August 4th, and on view through September 23, 2018. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Hamptons became one of the most significant meeting grounds of like-minded artists, who gathered on the beach, in local bars, and at the artist-run Signa Gallery in East Hampton (active from 1957-60). It was an extension of the vanguard artistic activity happening in New York City around abstraction, which constituted a radical re-definition of art. But the East End was also a place where artists were freer to experiment. For the second time, Eric Firestone Gallery pays homage to this rich Lee Krasner, Present Conditional, 1976 collage on canvas, 72 x 108 inches and layered history in Montauk Highway II.
    [Show full text]