Naive Art: Grandma Moses Art

Grandma Moses

Grandma Moses was a primitive painter that delighted art lovers with her wonderful rural scenes. She taught herself to paint, and had previously done embroidery. Artist like Anna Mary Robertson Moses, are also called folk artists As she continued to paint she created her own particular folk style.

She painted homey scenes, the countryside, summer and winter landscapes, and her community. She painted from a kitchen table in her studio, a storage room.

An engineer and art collector, Louis Caldor, saw some paintings of Anna Moses sitting in the window of a drug store. Her paintings impressed him, and he purchased all of her finished paintings and went to her home to meet her. Caldor helped Grandma Moses sell her art to a larger audience. He discovered her work in 1938. In 1939, her paintings were shown in "Contemporary Unknown American Painters" an exhibit of the Museum of Modern Art. She had a solo exhibition at Galerie Saint-Etiene  in 1940.

Gimbels Department Store showed fifty Moses pictures in November on the heels of the Museum of Modern Art exhibit, and the famous store spread a table by the paintings showing off her cooking talent: jams, breads, and cakes. Moses became a famous painter and a beloved homey figure--an American icon appearing on the Edward R. Murrow TV Show.  In 1953, her face dubbed Time Magazine.

She painted prolifically creating 3,600 paintings in thirty years.

Note: Grandma Moses pic from Library of Congress: Gifted by the New York World-Telegram & Sun; all rights dedicated to the public



Shop Amazon's Holiday Toy List