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Grandma
Moses, 1947. Is
she due for a
comeback?

8 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020

OR SOMEONE who didn’t get serious about painting
until her 70s, Anna Mary Robertson Moses managed
a singular artistic career. She made her debut in New
York City’s highly competitive art scene at the age
of 80 with a 1940 gallery exhibition, “What a Farm-
wife Painted.” Later that year she grabbed headlines
when she participated in the Thanksgiving Festi-
val at Gimbels department store in Manhattan. She
looked back on that moment in Grandma Moses Goes
to the Big City, a 1946 painting of the lush country-
side near her home in Eagle Bridge, New York. The
Smithsonian American Art Museum recently ac-
quired the painting.
By the end of the decade, a cottage industry of
greeting cards, upholstery and decorative china
bearing reproductions of her idyllic country scenes
had made Moses a national celebrity. In 1955, she
appeared alongside Louis Armstrong
in the fi rst color episode of Edward R.
Murrow’s “See It Now,” and in 1960, one
year before her death, Life magazine
celebrated her 100th birthday by put-
ting her on the cover.
Yet in one of the most unexpected
dimensions of her career, Moses also
became an unlikely government asset
in the Cold War, as I found while in-
vestigating how Moses benefi ted from
U.S. government eff orts to project a
rosy vision of America throughout Eu-
rope. Between June and December of 1950, a gov-
ernment-backed exhibition of Moses’ picturesque
American scenes toured six European cities. At the
U.S. Embassy in Paris in December 1950, works like
Here Comes Aunt Judith, depicting a family gather-
ing at Christmas, were lauded by many. “It is a great

pleasure to walk through such an exhibition, where
the soul is devoted to the peaceful life in the quiet
streets or in the warm interiors, in the midst of ani-
mals running loose or women working quietly,” one
French critic wrote.
The idea that art could provide, as the late art his-
torian Lloyd Goodrich put it, a “fallout shelter for
the human spirit,” was a major motive behind the
aggressive promotion of American art, music and
literature across war-ravaged Europe.
Propagandizing the fruits of liberal de-
mocracy in the face of Soviet commu-
nism was another objective. One For-
eign Service offi cer who was involved
with the Moses show declared that
the exhibition had been as valuable as
“pure gold” in promoting “the core of
our national character which we are en-
deavoring to articulate in opposition to
the eff orts of the communists.” Moses’
paintings in particular fulfi lled a key
objective of Cold War cultural diplo-
macy: combating Soviet portrayals of Americans as
mere capitalist dollar-chasers. The poet Archibald
MacLeish, a Librarian of Congress under Franklin D.

TO DISCOVER MORE trailblazing American women,
visit Because of Her Story at womenshistory.si.edu

IT IS A GREAT
PLEASURE TO WALK
THROUGH SUCH AN
EXHIBITION, WHERE
THE SOUL IS DEVOTED
TO THE PEACEFUL
LIFE.
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