Too Old for Art? Pooh-Pooh on That Said Grandma Moses

 

Grandma Moses and a winter scene from her 1955 appearance on Edward R. Murrow's See It Now.

Anna Mary Robertson was born on September 7, in Greenwich, Washington County, New York, a rural community east of the Hudson River and not far from the Green Mountains of Vermont in 1860.  She was the third of ten children of a farmer and flax miller.  She was rudimentaly educated in a one room schoolhouse where she was first exposed to drawing and experimented with paints she created from berry juices, red clay, and natural herbal dyes.  

By the age of 12 she was put out as a chore girl and household help to a wealthier family—the beginning of decades of hard toil as a domestic, hired farm help, and then hardscrabble farmer’s wife and mother.  In her spare time, she supplemented her family’s income with needlework—pictorial embroidery and quilting—which she sold to neighbors for pittance and pin money.  It was not until she was 76 and arthritis made needlework too painful that she took up painting as an alternative.  Within two years she had multiple individual exhibitions in New York City and was becoming famous as Grandma Moses.

Anna Marie Robinson age about 6.

Anna worked for several families in her early years.  One of them, the Whitesides, kinder or at least more attentive than the others, noticed her fascination with the several Currier & Ives prints that decorated their home.  They gave their servant her first chalk, crayons, and sketch books to try her own hand at drawing.  The Currier & Ives pastoral scenes remained an inspiration for her throughout the rest of her life.

A spinster of 27, Mary met Thomas Salmon Moses, a hired man on the same farm where she worked.  They married and her new husband convinced her to relocate far from home to the lush Shenandoah Valley near the Civil War battlefield at Staughton, Virginia.  They hired out as a farm couple hoping to save money for their own place.  Despite their best efforts, it was hard to get ahead, especially as their family grew.   Anna gave birth ten times and five of the children survived infancy.  Through heartbreak and toil Anna supplemented her family income by selling the homemade potato chips she fried in a kettle and the butter she churned from her only cow’s milk.

Anna Mary Moses and two surviving daughters.

She loved the beautiful Shenandoah country, but land there was far too rich for the family to ever afford.  Thomas looked back to New York where stone and stump farms could be purchased relatively cheaply from those who were moving on to the more productive land in the Mid West.  In 1905 they established a farm in Eagle Bridge, Renssalaer County north of Washington County.

In 1918 Anna painted, using common house paint, her earliest surviving piece, a decorative fireboard of a wooded scene with a pond.  But most of her art was the samplers and farm life scenes she sewed in the handsome quilts she made by firelight and kerosene lantern after all of the cooking and chores were done and the children tucked in for the night.   

Thomas Moses died suddenly of a heart attack at age 67 in 1927.   Anna’s son Forrest stepped in to help manage the farm as her increasing age and arthritis forced her to reduce her own physical labor. By the early '30s she was spending more time on her needlework and selling it to neighbors and at local fairs.  About the time that she moved in with a daughter in 1936, she followed her sister’s advice and switch to painting, despite not having touched brush in nearly two decades. 

Returning to the Currier & Ives prints that had long inspired her, her first efforts were frank copies of well-known images.  From the beginning Anna was self-consciously primitive eschewing the conventions of perspective for an almost pictograph approach rendered in vivid colors.  She depicted farmscapes, small towns, and landscapes..  She especially favored snow scenes.  Her paintings were, in her own words, old timey, recalling the rural life of her own youth.  There were no signs of modern life—no automobiles, tractors, farm equipment, paved roads, or telephone poles.

Once she started painting, nothing could stop her.  She produced canvases at an astonishing rate.  And the more she painted, the more she refined her distinctive style and began composing original scenes, not just re-interpretations of the prints she had admired.  Many were panoramic in scope.   She later told an interviewer that she would “get an inspiration and start painting; then I’ll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.”

Grandma Moses's early work like Early Spring on the Farm were evocative of Currier 7 Ives prints. 

She sold the painting locally for $3 to $5 apiece depending on size.  They were locally popular and some were placed in shops around the region.  In 1938, just two years after she started painting New York art collector Louis J. Caldor spotted some on display in the window of a Hoosick Falls drug store.  He bought their entire stock at Anna’s going rate and then tracked down the artist at her daughter’s home in town where he acquired several more.  Back in the city he showed his discoveries widely in his circle of art loving friends. 

From there the painter who had sold her works as simply Mrs. Moses, experienced an astonishing meteoric rise to fame.  The next year, three Grandma Moses paintings were included in the Museum of Modern Art Contemporary Unknown American Painter show. Her first solo exhibition, What a Farm Wife Painted, October 1940 was at Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne. She came to the Big Apple for meet-and-greet with the press and public and an exhibition of 50 paintings at Gimbel’s Department Store on November 15. Her display included samples of her County Fair ribbon wining baked goods and preserves.   That charmed the pants off of the press, even the sometimes snooty art critic crowd who dubbed her Grandma Moses, a name that stuck and became a brand.  Her third solo show opened in December at the Whyte Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Norman Rockwell was Grandma Moses's friend and a neighbor just over the Vermont line.  In 1948 he included her in the welcoming crowd in this painting The Homecoming for a Saturday Evening Post Christmas cover.  Rockwell himself can be seen with the pipe.

By 1944 she was officially represented by the Galerie St. Etienne and the American British Art Center which successfully marketed her work to folks loaded with war time boom cash and precious few consumer items available on which to spend it.  With her painting now selling for hundreds of dollars, art dealer Kallir set up Grandma Moses Properties, Inc. for her to license her work as prints, calendars, cards and notepapers, and eventually a galaxy of products from coffee mugs to fabric prints.

By 1950 still active at age 90 Moses entered a decade in which she became a widely revered national cultural icon.  She had already been named as Mademoiselle magazine’s Young Woman of the Year at age 88 and was presented the National Press Club Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Art in 1949 by President Harry S Truman himself.  Then in 1950 director Jerome Hill’s documentary profile Grandma Moses which was written and narrated by poet Archibald McLeish was nominated for an Academy Award.  In 1952 her autobiography My Life’s History was published, edited by her longtime friend, supporter, and exhibitor Otto Kallir.  Three years later America got to see the aging painter on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now documentary series on CBS.

Grandma Moses's 1952 autobiography.

Through the decade honors piled on honors.  Reproductions of her work decorated many homes and all sorts of merchandise sold briskly in department stores, gift shops, and catalogues.  Several international exhibitions were a success and the State Department sponsored good will tours of her work as part of their program to use the arts to enhance American prestige.

Grandma Moses’s success was due to the breadth of her appeal—sometime to audiences that seemed mutually antagonistic.  Conservatives responded to her nostalgia for an earlier, simple America for the same reason they were drawn at the same time to things like Currier & Ives print reproductions and the early magazine cover work of Norman Rockwell before he became overtly supportive of liberal and progressive causes.  All of it seemed like a rejection of modernity, relativism, and what they viewed as the ugly and subversive chaos of modern art.

On the other hand, many liberals embraced her work as a folk expression and an authentic voice of the people.  They read stories of her life and recognized a woman who toiled, sacrificed, and often suffered and overcame those obstacles to find self-expression.  The same kinds of folks were also promoting folk music revivals and other expressions of people’s art.  A couple of decades later pioneering feminist art historians assessed her work as a breakthrough to popular acceptance by a woman artist.

At her best as in this panoramic scene of a village fair, Grandma Moses's paintings are alive with people, action, and color.

Surprisingly, Grandma Moses was even admired by much—but not all—of the arts establishment which was often hostile to work outside of anointed movements, especially Post-War abstract expressionism and other non-representative forms.  As soon as it became clear that her work was helping to create a whole new category—folk art—that did not lay claim to being fine art, they were ready to embrace it as décor.  Some critics even found that her vivid colors and sometime scattered compositions were almost abstract themselves.  Other compared her work to the peasant life and winter scenes of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the revered 16th Century Dutch/Flemish master.

Slowing down, but not yet done, Moses turned 100 years old in 1960 and was honored by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller who proclaimed Grandma Moses Day and by a Time magazine cover story.  A highly lauded children’s book, The Grandma Moses Story Book, was published the next year.

But even Grandma Moses was not immortal.  In the end she just wore out and died in a Hoosick Falls hospital on December 13, 1961 at the age of 101.  She was buried in a town cemetery where her simple grave has become a pilgrimage site.  On her death President John F. Kennedy who had acquired her art for the White House said;

The death of Grandma Moses removed a beloved figure from American life. The directness and vividness of her paintings restored a primitive freshness to our perception of the American scene. Both her work and her life helped our nation renew its pioneer heritage and recall its roots in the countryside and on the frontier. All Americans mourn her loss.

The Post Office's 1969 Grandma Moses commemorative featured Fourth of July from the White House art collection acquired during the Kennedy administration. 

In the wake of her death there was a spate of traveling exhibitions to major American and European museums.  In 1968 the Post Office issued a Grandma Moses stamp featuring the painting Fourth of July from the White House Collection.

Of course, decades have passed and tastes change.  A couple of generations are barely familiar with Grandma Moses.  Like those Currier & Ives prints and the faux country crafts décor movement of the 1990’s her rustic and rural art doesn’t fit with a techno-gadget lifestyle.  Still, she has her niche.  The folk art market she helped to create is still quite lively, at least for older collectors.  And despite having produced an astonishing 1,500 or more canvas over her career, individual paintings can still command high values.  Sugaring off sold at auction for $1.2 million.  Even though the folk art market has taken a significant hit since the 2008 Financial Crash, fine examples of her work can still command figures in the low 100 thousands.  Not bad considering some of them first sold for less than $5.

Marilyn Monroe at 100--The Candle in the Wind

                     

                                    Quintessential Marilyn--frank, inviting, vulnerable.

One hundred years ago on June 1, 1926 baby Norma Jean was born in Los Angeles to an attractive young woman who worked as an RKO film cutter.  Mortenson was the name on her birth certificate.  Her father abandoned the family before her birth and her mother Gladys took to calling her Norma Jean Baker, the name she would use through childhood, after an earlier lover.  She was never sure who her father was and her mother, who battled mental illness kept a parade of men through the house between periods in an institution. 

By age six she was being farmed out to relatives and friends with unhappy periods in foster care.  Her longest term care giver, a family friend, filled her with fantasies of becoming a movie star.  At age nine she began two years of Dickensonian torment in the Los Angeles Orphan’s Home working in the kitchen for 5 cents a week.  She was released to yet another foster home. 

After a brief turn at Van Nuys High School, she took a job at age 16 at a Los Angeles aircraft plant applying dope to canvas wing covers.  She married co-worker James Doughety mostly to avoid being sent to another foster home.  He was soon inducted into the service.  

                         

                                     What started it all--Mrs. Doughety at the defense plant.

A photographer visiting the plant to document women war workers zeroed in on the attractive girl and suggested that she become a model.  Although her first shoot paid only $5, it was enough to get her to quit the plant.  Soon she was getting regular work in pin-up and bathing suit pictures, in addition to some commercial work.  She was modeling under the name Norma Jean Doughety when photos came to the attention of producers. 

In 1946, the same year she divorced her husband in Las Vegas, she signed a development contract with 20th Century Fox, where her name was changed to Marilyn Monroe.  Monroe had been her mother’s maiden name.  Marilyn was borrowed from Marilyn Maxwell, a second-tier Betty Grable.  She was given bit parts and promoted with things like being named Miss California Artichoke Queen in 1947.  After walk-ons and bits, she was cast in a small speaking part as waitress in the turgid teen melodrama Dangerous Years.  Her contract was not renewed, and Marilyn returned to modeling and took acting lessons. 

With an I.Q. above 160 Marilyn was always trying to improve herself and yearned to become a serious actress.  She also read voluminously, focusing on history, biography, and literature.  She felt cheated by her lack of formal education and wanted to be able to hold serious conversations.

She was briefly picked up by Columbia Pictures, where she got the second lead with two songs in the burlesque musical Ladies of the Chorus.  Despite personally good notices for this B-picture, Columbia dropped her contract. 

In 1949 she appeared in the Marx Brothers’ final feature film Love Happy in a brief role as detective Groucho’s client.  By this time, she had changed her light brown hair to a golden blonde and was rooming with another buxom aspiring blonde, Shelly Winters.  Her modeling assignments, which that year included the famous nude calendar art shoot that ended up years later as Playboy’s first centerfold, were getting more attention. Despite lacking a studio contract her personal publicist was giving her the standard starlet build-up and she was beginning to get noticed in gossip columns and fan magazines. 

1950 was Marilyn’s break out year in two small, but unforgettable appearances—MGM’s Asphalt Jungle, and even more memorably as the bombshell at Margo Channing’s (Bette Davis) party in All About Eve.  Her roles were getting bigger and better.  She was a war-buddy distraction to William Lundigan as the husband of June Haver in the domestic comedy, Love Nest.

She was second billed, but this movie made her a top star.

In 1953 Marilyn stunned audiences as the mentally ill hotel babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock with Richard Widmark, a role which drew on her own insecurities and demons.  The same year she displayed her knack for comedy in Monkey Business with Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant.  It was her first performance as a platinum blonde, a shade selected to differentiate her from her aging co-star Rogers.  The same year her turn as a murderess in the film noir Niagara with Joseph Cotton was another reminder of her serious acting chops.   But it was the busy actress’s role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with her memorable turn as Lorelei Lee made Monroe a true star of the first rank.  She capped the year playing a very dumb, bespectacled blonde in the ensemble comedy How to Mary a Millionaire with another predecessor as Hollywood’s blonde bombshell du jure, Betty Grable.  

Wedding day with Joe DiMaggio.

In January of 1954 she married baseball superstar Joe DiMaggio and was soon on a famous USO tour to Korea where the attention of the troops stunned her new husband.  The shy and reserved DiMaggio wanted Monroe to quit her career, resulting in a divorce in less than a year, although the pair remained friendly, and DiMaggio famously carried a torch for her even after her death.  Wearing mostly tight jeans and plaid shirt, she made Otto Preminger’s western adventure, The River of No Return with Robert Mitchum and the show-biz musical There’s No Business Like Show Business in which she held her own with musical heavy weights Ethyl Merman, Dan Dailey, and Donald O’Connor.  Her next film was the comic hit Seven Year Itch remembered for its iconic publicity shot of her white dress billowing around her waist as she stood over a subway ventilation grill.

During filming, there were reports of chronic lateness on the set and other problems began to surface.  Always plagued with self-doubt and probably suffering from genetic bi-polar disorder, she also had genuine health problems—a serious gynecological condition, endometriosis, that could be quite painful. 

In 1955 Monroe was suspended by Twentieth Century Fox for refusing to make How to be Very, Very Popular and The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing because she wanted to break away from her image as a sex symbol.  She fled to New York City where she joined Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio to study Method acting.  She also began serious Freudian analysis and spent time with the city’s literary set, where she met playwright Arthur Miller.  After nearly a year off, she returned to Hollywood and played in the screen adaptation of William Inge’s acclaimed play Bus Stop.  This time she finally wowed critics as well as the audience with her nuanced performance as the fragile, innocent sexpot Cheri.

Next up was a trip to England to be directed by and co-star with Lawrence Olivier in The Prince and the Show Girl, where her chronic lateness and her devotion to the Method drove the traditionally trained Olivier nearly to distraction. 

Monroe took most of 1958 off to study and spend time with Miller.  In 1959 she had her greatest success in a comedy in writer/director Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.  With personal acting coach Paula Strasberg on the set, she was a problem and demanded as many as 83 takes before she felt she had “nailed it.”  Wilder and co-star Jack Lemon were patient with her, but leading man Tony Curtis was so frustrated that he compared kissing Monroe to “kissing Hitler.” 

Monroe’s troubled marriage to Miller was coming unwound with her bouts of depression, angry accusations that Miller did not respect her, and casual love affairs.  A liaison with French actor Yves Montand during the making of George Cukor’s musical comedy dud Let’s Make Love was just one last straw in the marriage.  Monroe by this time was heavily dependent on sleeping pills and sedatives. 

The Misfits, fine dramatic tour de force for the stellar cast, will forever have an aura of doom clouding it after Clark Gable's death.  It was also one of Clift's last films, and Monroe's last completed film.

With their marriage already rocky, Miller wrote gift screenplay for Monroe—The Misfits starring Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, and Eli Wallach directed by John Huston which was shot in 1960 and released in February 1961 following Gable’s fatal heart attack.

Miller and Monroe announced their separation shortly after Gable’s death, for which Marilyn felt guilty.  Soon she was hospitalized in a mental institution so stark that a desperate call to former husband DiMaggio got him to drive from San Francisco to retrieve her and help her find another institution.   

Monroe wore no underwear and had to be sewn into the tight beaded gown she wore when she crooned Happy Birthday, Mr. President to John F. Kennedy causing a scandal.

Upon release she restlessly became involved with serial affairs including liaisons with Rat Pack leader Frank Sinatra and his pal Peter Lawford, who introduced her to his in-laws John and Robert Kennedy.  She had affairs with both, which was an ill-kept secret in Hollywood.  Monroe created something of a scandal and a sensation when she crooned Happy Birthday, Mr. President to John in a shimmering sheath dress so tight she had to be sewn into it.

These relationships, made public in the years after her death, shaped her legend and fed a thousand conspiracy theories.  One conspiracy theory proved to be true—FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover had every room of her Hollywood home bugged in an attempt to get damaging goods on the President and/or his boss Bobby, the Attorney General.  The super-sophisticated bugging equipment was discovered hidden in the house when it was remodeled in 1972.

Her reputation for unreliability made it hard for Monroe to get parts even at her home studio Fox.  They gave her one last chance with the comedy Something’s Got to Give, but production was suspended because of her chronic absences from the set.  Footage released later, including a stunning swimming pool scene, revealed that Monroe remained luminous on film no matter her personal demons. 

With a genius level IQ Marylin sought out the company of great minds like Carl Sandburg and Albert Einstein--and they reveled in her company.

Despite all of these problems Monroe was in discussions for several projects and was reported in good spirits by friends shortly before her death.  In her last days DiMaggio, concerned about “the people she had fallen in with,” reportedly was ready to ask her to re-marry him.  

On August 5, 1962, hours after last speaking to DiMaggio, Monroe was found on her bed with the phone in her hand.  She was naked, but ordinarily slept without clothes.  Several bottles of pills were found.  Her personal physician reported that he found the body after being alerted by the housekeeper. 

Police found several inconsistencies in various accounts given of her final hours and evidence that the scene had been tampered with, including the laundering of the bed linens and removal of any water glass.  Autopsy results indicated death as acute barbiturate poisoning and a likely suicide.  Revelations of the Kennedy connections have fueled dozens of conspiracy theories. 

Joe DiMaggio left roses at Monroe's crypt every year on the anniversary of her death until he died.

DiMaggio claimed Monroe’s body and arranged her funeral.  Famously, he left a dozen roses at her mausoleum vault every year on the anniversary of her death.   Monroe’s will left 25% of her estate to her acting coach, Lee Strasberg and 25% to the Freud Institute for Psychoanalysis. 

Her life, death and career have sparked an industry, including over 600 books.  Marilyn seemed to be everywhere with new books, an award winning 2011 film with Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn, based on her time in England doing The Prince and the Show Girl, the TV series Smash! chronicling the road to Broadway for a Marilyn musical, and Ana de Armas in 2021 in Blonde, the second film version of Joyce Carol Oates’ fictionalized biography. 

But back in 1973 Elton John and Bernie Taupin may have summed up Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe’s life best: a Candle in the Wind.

A Grim Anniversary Rolls Around Again as Its Memory Dims

New Yorkers hastily gobbled up extra edition newspapers. 

November 22.  For members of at least a couple of generations, I don’t have to say or write anything else.  You know.  The date and the event are etched in your memory.  If you were sentient in 1963 the moment you heard the news is so solidly implanted in your memory that you can recall every detail—the cast of the light, the muffled sobs and wails, even the smell of the Autumn day 62 years ago. 

November 22, 1963 was, of course, the day President John D. Kennedy was shot while passing the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas, Texas in an open car with his young wife, resplendent in pink, sitting beside him. 

 Moments before shots were fired a smiling J.F.K. and his glamorous wife Jacqueline rode in the open car behind Texas Governor John Connolly and his wife.

I am not going to relate all the details.  You know them. Nor am I going to sort out the 1,354 or so various conspiracy theories which have been put forward.  Most of them are ridiculous.  A few are compelling.  The official Warren Commission Report was as full of holes as Swiss cheese. and the Congressional investigations since then have at best given us a glimpse “through a glass darkly” The absolute truth, if there is any such a thing, will probably elude us. 

In one of the most memorable moments in television history CBS anchor Walter Cronkite removed his glasses as he delivered the somber news the President had died.  Many who rushed home from school or work saw it live.

It is enough to know that a young President, in whom so many of us had cast great hope, was killed by some vague unknowable Them who wanted him dead.  That hope, merited or not, by the flawed individual was crushed.  

It is the stuff of Legend.  Two hundred years from now operas, epic poems. or whatever form heroic art takes shape then, will imbue the event in magic and dignity. 

Yet right now, this is still particularly our day.  It owns us inescapably. 

Many rushed to buy the special hard bound Kennedy memorial Life Magazine edition that included photos of the funeral and kept it for decades.

But for my own grown children it is only a historical event.  Their stomachs do not flip with remembrance.  They acknowledge it without understanding it the way we acknowledged December 7, 1941—the single stark moment in our parents’ lives.  For them September 11, 2001 was the pivot of history. 

Much attention was paid to the President's grave at Arlington National Cemetery with its Eternal Flame.  Extreme weather conditions and government shut downs have extinguished the flame briefly.  The bodies of the President's two infant children--Patrick and Arabella, were re-interred on the site at the request of his widow.  Later his brothers Robert and Edward as well a Jacqueline herself were added to the plot.

And as for my grandchildren...well it just another day in the walk-up to Thanksgiving and the Christmas season.  They hardly know who John Kennedy was.  They never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.  If reminded, they may grunt a foggy awareness.  But it is no more real to them than the Peloponnesian Wars.