Date: 4-20-2001
AMERICAN MOSAIC #814 - Grandma Moses Show
By Caty Weaver
HOST:
The American artist known as Grandma Moses did not begin painting until she was more than seventy-five years old. But her work soon was popular around the world. Shep O'Neal tells about her paintings now being shown in Washington, D-C.
ANNCR:
Jane Kallir (kuh-leer) is an expert on the art of Grandma Moses. Mizz Kallir's grandfather was an art dealer in New York City. He organized Grandma Moses's first major show in Nineteen-Forty.
Sixty-one years later, Mizz Kallir is the guest organizer for a show of Grandma Moses's work. It is called "Grandma Moses in the Twenty-First Century." The exhibit is at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
About ninety paintings are in the show. The colorful pictures show everyday life in small farming villages during the last century. That is the kind of life Grandma Moses knew in the states of New York and Virginia.
Grandma Moses wrote that her art was a combination of memory and hope.There is a sense of well-being in most of the paintings. The people look healthy and happy. Farmhouses and other buildings appear strong and well built. The farm animals are clean and fat. The grass is deep green. The snow is pure white.
But the life shown is not an easy one. Many of Grandma Moses's paintings show the hard labor connected to farm life. Men are gathering hay and hunting. Women are sewing quilts and taking care of children.
Mizz Kallir writes that Grandma Moses used pictures in magazines and newspapers to help create her paintings. She cut out the pictures of people, animals and other things. She placed the cuttings on a piece of wood and drew around them. Then she painted them. This gives her subjects a flat quality.
Grandma Moses's name was Anna Mary Robertson Moses. She began painting when the disease arthritis prevented her from doing the sewing she loved. She showed her paintings at country fairs and stores.An art collector discovered them and had them shown in New York City.By the early Nineteen-Fifties, Grandma Moses was famous around the world.
Grandma Moses died in Nineteen-Sixty-One at the age of one-hundred-one.She had produced more than one-thousand-six-hundred paintings in the last twenty years of her life.
Source: www.voa.gov/special/