Smithsonian_03_2020

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Roosevelt, wasn’t bothered by the absence of con-
fl ict, poverty or suff ering in her work, arguing that
art sent abroad should “subordinate to some extent
the worst elements of our culture.”
As a Mayfl ower-descended matriarch old enough
to remember hearing the news of Abraham Lincoln’s
assassination, Moses had unassailable patriotic cre-
dentials. President Harry Truman was a prominent
admirer: When the two met at an awards ceremony
in 1949, he reportedly told the audience that he and
Moses “were in complete agreement over ‘ham-and-
egg art,’ ” his derisive term for abstract painting,
then becoming increasingly favored. Truman would
go on to welcome paintings by Moses into the offi cial
White House collection and, later, his own home.
Her fame was so wide-ranging that—ironically—it
eventually caused her to be written out of the histo-
ry of midcentury American art. This erasure began
with the American art critics of her day, who were

frustrated, especially in the wake of her European
tour, by her ascendancy. Clement Greenberg, an en-
emy of kitsch and its seduction of mass taste, pre-
ferred to celebrate fi gures such as Jackson Pollock,
whose elimination of pictorial content in his drip
paintings challenged the appetite for realism that
fueled Moses’ popularity.
Today, as the art world rethinks its traditional em-
phasis on white male artists, Moses is being re-eval-
uated. She will fi gure prominently in an exhibition
I am curating next year at Atlanta’s High Museum
of Art, and her work will be showcased on an even
larger scale in a solo exhibition being planned by the
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
It’s a pretty safe bet that audiences will once again
fi nd solace in Moses’ verdant hills and snow-covered
farmscapes. And perhaps now that she is no longer
perceived as a threat to the acceptance of abstract
art, which now sits
comfortably with-
in the canon, the
critics will fi nally
come around too.

Canceled Culture
IN 1947, CONGRESS CALLED OFF AN
INTERNATIONAL TOUR OF AMERICAN
ART FOR ITS ALLEGED SUBVERSION
By Katherine Jentleson

BEN SHAHN
HUNGER, 1946
Shahn’s sympa-
thetic rendering of
American poverty in
this painting made
it the target of crit-
ics in Congress and
beyond, who were
irate to see art that
deviated from the
mythology that the
nation was a land
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE of plenty.
COS COB, 1926
American art critics were
appalled to see Congress reject
even O’Keeff e’s widely beloved
botanicals; the critic Edward Alden
Jewell warned the reaction would
“lead to disastrous consequences
unless checked in time.”

YASUO KUNIYOSHI,
CIRCUS GIRL RESTING, 1925
Today one of the most celebrated
works in Kuniyoshi's oeuvre, this styl-
ized portrait eschews conventional
female beauty, famously provoking
President Harry Truman to declare,
“If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot.”


ROMARE BEARDEN
AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON, 1946
Abstract styles such as Bearden’s caused
Republican Representative George Dondero to
boom: “Art which does not portray our beautiful
country in plain, simple terms that everyone can
understand breeds dissatisfaction.”

BYLINES

Katherine Jentleson’s book Gatecrashers: The
Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America will be
published this spring.

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