Anna Mary Robertson 'Grandma' Moses (1860-1961)
The Old Oaken Bucket
signed 'MOSES.' (lower right)
oil on Masonite
24 x 32 in. (61 x 81.3 cm.)
Painted in 1944.
Footnotes:
Provenance
James Vigeveno Galleries, Los Angeles.
Private collection, San Francisco.
Sale, Butterfield & Butterfield, Los Angeles & San Francisco, December 12, 1996, lot 3116.
Private collection, California, acquired at the above sale.
By descent to the present owner within the family of the above.

This work, painted on June 23, 1944, was assigned a catalogue raisonne number of Kallir 388A and entered into her record book on page 30.

The copyright for this picture is reserved to Grandma Moses Properties, Co., New York.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known affectionately the world over as Grandma Moses, spent most of her life in upstate New York and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, living a modest, agrarian life with her husband and 5 children. This self-taught artist did not start making pictures until her 60s and only began painting seriously in her late 70s, as a way to keep herself busy when housework had become too strenuous for her arthritic hands. In 1938, collector Louis J. Caldor (d. 1973) discovered her works hanging in a drug store amid crocheted doilies and homemade jellies in Hoosick Falls, and immediately set out to promote her works. A year later, Caldor had successfully convinced Sidney Janis (1896-1989) to include three works by Moses in the show 'Contemporary Unknown American Painters' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In this same year, Austrian art historian and dealer Otto Kallir opened the New York offices for his famed Galerie St. Etienne. Kallir was the man to introduce Austrian and German Expressionism to the American audience, particularly by artists Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Egon Schiele (1890-1918), and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), though had a personal interest in 'primitive' painting and folk art. Caldor brought Moses' work to Kallir, who held her first one-woman show in 1940, and established themselves as her primary dealer. Kallir and Hildegard Bachert, who was the primary liaison for Moses at the Galerie, would help her navigate the fame and popularity that would transpire in the coming years, including copyrighting all her works and securing a deal with Hallmark to reproduce her paintings as Christmas cards. By the late 1940s, Grandma Moses was a superstar, including being received by President Truman at the White House in 1949 and being featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1953. Despite this immense fame, she rarely left her farmhouse in upstate New York and made few changes to her humble everyday life. On the occasion of her 100th birthday in 1960, then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared it 'Grandma Moses Day.'

Her works, much like her life, are focused on the landscape and activities associated with farming and rural living. Her paintings are time capsules which colorfully capture the moments of everyday life littered with narrative vignettes which commemorated specific events which were fundamental to rural life. Though frequently referred to as a 'primitive' painter, Moses' paintings are far more complex and richer in nuance than often credited, as can be seen in The Old Oaken Bucket. Her paintings lack linear perspective and so they must be read as the eye drifts over the surface, adding up details to create a cumulative composition and narrative. In The Old Oaken Bucket, she has shown us a winter scene, and all is calm in preparation for the busy spring months to come. In the foreground at left, she has added in a winding river bisected by a water wheel and at right a group of cattle grazes while people are performing their daily chores. Beyond this, a litany of snow-covered trees and fields fills the midground. The flat planes of blue and periwinkle at the horizon line are likely the Taconic range of the Appalachian Mountains, which runs along the New York border from Connecticut to Vermont.