The Old Lady of Eagle Bridge

By ROBERT HUGHES

At Washington's National Gallery, a primitive revisited

Primitives are the kittens of art; they stand for a kind of sweet, prelapsarian innocence that culture, which means complexity, tends to deny. Even so, Grandma Moses' popularity was unusual, and the show of 43 of her paintings at the National Gallery in Washington scarcely invites criticism. She was one of those infrequent artists whom everyone likes, and most people love.

The major primitives of modern art, Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) and Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), never experienced such affection and fame in their own lifetimes--which, admittedly, were shorter than that of Anna Mary Robertson Moses, who died in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., in 1961 at the age of 101. By then, she had received two honorary doctorates, and a 6-c- stamp had been issued to commemorate her; Edward R. Murrow had put her on television; New York State had twice declared Grandma Moses Day; her work had been exhibited round the world and interminably reproduced on greeting cards. Next to Norman Rockwell, she was the best-known American artist.

She was also shrewd. "I don't advise anyone to take it up as a business proposition," she wrote of her chosen metier, "unless they really have talent, and are crippled so as to deprive them of physical labor. Then with help they might make a living. But with taxes and income tax, there is little money in that kind of art for the ordinary artist." Since then, thousands of painters have ignored Grandma Moses' advice, but not one has achieved her pitch of personal celebrity.

By the 1950s she was rather like Omai, the noble savage whom Captain Cook brought back from Tahiti to the court of George III. America loved Grandma Moses as the representative of natural virtue--the ambassadress of a past that was al ready being sentimentalized on an industrial scale. Her America of checkered farmhouses, old oaken buckets, barn-raising parties, whirring buggy wheels, and quilting bees was not the America of the Korean War, the TV-quiz scandals, the McCarthy terror and the Detroit assembly lines. But it had been a real place, and Grandma Moses not only knew it well--she had lived all her life on farms--but knew it in clear and sparkling detail. She was thus the living witness to other Americans' fantasies, a creature both homely and exotic: the Earth Grandmother of Eagle Bridge.

Since most people instinctively feel that the world gets worse, not better, the only basis of genuinely popular art is nostalgia. Grandma Moses supplied it--not out of any desire to create a product, but simply in order to maintain her own memories. "I like to paint old-timy things, historical landmarks of long ago, bridges, mills and hostelries, those old-time homes, there are a few left, and they are going fast. I do them all from memory, most of them are daydreams, as it were."

How good a painter was she? By the standards of a Matisse, not very; beside most "primitive" Western artists, however, she was a spry old wonder. Most primitive art today is a mimicry of that unmediated, clumsy freshness of vision that once recreated itself, beyond style, in each true nai'f. But in a world saturated by print and photography, it is difficult to be a nai'f; art is too available. Grandma Moses was not un touched by commerce, but nobody could doubt the integrity of her work or the delicacy of her imagination. She was a graceful colorist, seldom candied or sentimental, and never coarse. In those blue-gray distances of field and forest, punctuated by the silhouette of a horse (the creature's profile cut like a weather vane, as though by shears) or the bright red caesura of a barn, one sees the equivalent of perfect natural pitch in singers: an instinctive truth of tone, the mark of a born painter. At her best, she makes nearly every American "primitive" who has appeared since her death look postcardy; her own nostalgia, however tempered by cuteness now and then, has not lost its ability to work on us. -- Robert Hughes

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