Grandma Moses: American Modern?

Wednesday July 22, 2020
1:00 pm Eastern Time

This LIVE Zoom presentation is FREE for Bennington Museum Members

Not-Yet-Member rate: $12

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So you think you know Grandma Moses? She’s that little old lady who began painting quaint pictures of country life in her mid-70s and went on to become one of America’s first artist celebrities. Right?

Perhaps, but there is far more to her story.

Surprisingly, Moses’ paintings were first introduced to an art world audience at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939. Moses’ life spanned the entire history of modern art. She was born before the rise of Impressionism in France, and died just as postmodernism was getting underway. She combined multiple perspectives in the same painting and used collage and popular imagery, unconsciously paralleling the techniques of Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art. In many ways her work even anticipates ideas about appropriation, commercialism, and the manufactured nature of nostalgia that would take the art world by storm in the decades following her death.

Moses was a highly skilled artist who refined her art through practice and created a unique world of her own imagining. By placing Moses’ paintings in dialogue with works by iconic modernists, this presentation encourages you to discover for yourself how these artists were more alike than you might have ever imagined.

JAMIE FRANKLIN has been curator at the Bennington Museum since 2005. His work has focused on American art of the early to mid-20th century, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of modernism and self-taught art. He has organized exhibitions and written books, essays and articles featuring artists and topics including Milton Avery, Erastus Salisbury Field, Grassroots Art, Impressionism, Rockwell Kent, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, and Alice Neel.

We look forward to seeing you!