BENNINGTON — Staff members of the Bennington Museum are preparing a comprehensive Grandma Moses exhibition in the renovated and extended first-floor space devoted to her work.
Highlighting the new-look gallery will be five Moses paintings recently acquired from the Kallir Research Institute.
There will be a premiere celebration on Thursday, March 28, shortly before the Museum reopens to the public after its traditional winter break. Tickets can be purchased through the Museum’s website.
Museum Curator Jamie Franklin on Wednesday took a break from work hanging paintings in the expanded gallery to discuss the renovations and many of the works displayed.
“We wanted to make sure that our Moses galleries were looking as good as possible,” he said. “Obviously, Moses is our biggest attraction. And we wanted to make sure that we were showing her off to the best advantage.”
The renovation extends the Moses Gallery into the adjacent hallway gallery which connects it to the Grandma Moses Schoolhouse. Renovations include new lights, new walls, and a door between the gallery and the schoolhouse. The gallery walls are now painted a light shade of purple that Moses often used for figures in her paintings.
Anna Mary Robertson ”Grandma" Moses (1860–1961) spent most of her life as a farm wife and mother. Without formal training she took up painting in her 70s and became famous. The Bennington Museum has the largest public collection of her work.
New acquisitions
The new Moses acquisitions are a diverse lot. They include two landscapes, “Mt. Nebo in Winter,” (1943) and “Cambridge Valley” (1943); one of maple sugaring activity in the woods, “Sugaring Off” (1955); one painting set indoors, “Old Times,” (1957); and one of an artistically imagined actual historical event, “Great Fire (The Burning of Troy 1862)” (1939).
These paintings fill in gaps in the Museum’s collection. For instance, such bird’s-eye views of the landscape were not something it had among its Moses works. In all, Moses probably only did about 20 paintings of interior scenes, such as “Old Times,” Franklin said.
The source of these acquisitions, The Kallir Research Institute, (KRI) is a nonprofit foundation established in 2017 to continue and expand upon the scholarship of art historian and art dealer Otto Kallir and his Galerie St. Etienne, which was in New York City.
According to the KRI website, “Grandma Moses was ‘discovered’ in 1940 by Otto Kallir, who oversaw her rise to international fame.
“When Otto was representing Grandma Moses, and Moses was still alive, he started accumulating a collection of her work that he held on to as a way of making sure that he could send out exhibitions of Grandma Moses’ work into the world,” Franklin said.
In fact, the Bennington Museum borrowed items in this collection for past Moses exhibitions. In its transition from Galerie St. Etienne to the non-profit KRI, the organization has been making a concerted effort to get the works it was holding out into public collections, he said.
Moving from the main gallery into the hallway, the exhibition will show works and tell stories that expand on the art in the main gallery. These include paintings by Moses’ family members. One of these is the only known surviving painting by her father.
“In her autobiography, (Moses) talked at some length about how her father was really the person who encouraged her and her artistic pursuits as a young child,” Franklin said. “He painted landscapes, presumably something like this, (hung) on the walls of their home.”
Fred Robertson, her brother, also painted works of similar subject matter but in a different style. A work by her son Forrest King Moses is also included. “He was also quite an exceptional artist,” Franklin said.
Will Moses, her great-grandson, is still painting today. He still lives and works out of the family home at Mount Nebo in Eagle Bridge, N.Y. There will be two paintings by him in the exhibition.
The exhibition also includes other self-taught artists, including Pasquele “Patsy” Santo (1893-1975). He was a Bennington-based artist who came to fame in the 1930s around the same time as Moses. A painting by him called “Ready for Battle,” depicting a snowball fight on School Street in Bennington with a view of Main Street recognizable today, will be part of the exhibit.
Work from more contemporary self-taught artists, such as Jessica Park, of Williamstown, Mass., will also be displayed.
The gallery will include photographs and documents from the era of Moses’ fame. These include articles in national magazines, a photo with then-New York candidate for governor Nelson Rockefeller, and an invitation to attend the second inauguration of President Dwight Eisenhower, himself an amateur painter.
Hallmark Greeting Cards featuring Moses’ work are also included. “In the first year of Grandma Moses creating greeting cards that were printed and distributed by Hallmark, 16 million were sold,” Franklin said.
At the end of the hallway, on a big-screen television, Moses’ beloved interview with journalist Edward R. Murrow will play.
Community support
Proceeds from the Museum’s winter Gala, funds from a foundation, and a significant individual gift made the renovated Moses gallery possible.
“The Moses expansion was the focus of our winter Gala, and the people who attended the Gala did contribute handily,” said Martin W. Mahoney, Museum executive director on Wednesday.
“We’re really lucky to have that kind of community support that believes in the museum, believes in the mission and shares the importance of Moses not only to the greater art world but to our community here,” he said, “and frankly how she helps drive attendance and commerce in our community.”