SEPTEMBER 2, FRIDAY

GRANDMA MOSES

Yesterday I contrasted the live’s of the ordinary people who were driven by something within them to paint or quilt with the upper class elegance of the Asheville Art Museum and the high society way the museum funds their exhibits. Today I want to apologize.

The more I read about these artists and look at the art they made on my iPad the more I am touched by them and the more I am dislocated.

It is very unlikely I would have seen these art works in the American Folk Art Museum in New York even if I were to spend the money it would take to get to New York. But here they are in Asheville, North Carolina, at great expense to someone and through a great deal of effort on a number of people’s parts. All I had to do was ride to the Asheville Art Museum, pay my $7, spend an hour with the paintings and drive home. So I take back my high society comments and instead say thank you.

What struck me about so many of the people in this folk art exhibit is how constrained their lives were. Most of the people in this show had everything working against them. They were self taught and worked often with the poorest of materials and had very little time after full days of hard work to make art. Some had physical or psychological disabilities. And yet all of them had a need to make art and a drive, in spite of obstacles, to do it no matter what. Most were also not rewarded in any way for what they did. They created what they created out of a passionate drive, a need to make art, usually with very little support.

The person who represents this hard life as much as any of the artists is Grandma Moses, who had a painting in the show.

When I was a boy in the 1950’s Grandma Moses was famous. But she didn’t start painting until she was 76. She took up painting because her arthritis would no longer let her do embroidery. So she started to paint country scenes and soon was recognized. The paintings that she first sold for $3 to $5 were sold within a few years for thousands of dollars.

But the first 76 years of her life were as hard as any of the artists in the show. From the age of 12 she became a housekeeper on a nearby farm. Then she had worked on farm after farm with her husband until he died of a heart attack at 69. Five of her ten children died in infancy. She briefly attended a one room school but was essentially uneducated. That she was recognized as a serious artist was so miraculous it was beyond belief, none of these other artists were.

She was honored by Presidents, had one of her paintings on a postage stamp, earned thousands of dollars, partly because her realistic paintings were accessible to people in a Hallmark card kind of way, but also because she was such an unlikely peppy old lady that people couldn’t resist her.

But no one else in this show had her luck. It is the rest of them that have haunted me since I saw the show, outsiders and misfits, who followed their passion without it seeming to lead anywhere.