Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses
American, 1860–1961
Black Horses, 1942
Oil on Masonite
Galerie St. Etienne, New YorkThe gallerist Otto Kallir gave Moses her first New York show, What a Farm Wife Painted, in 1940, and when he saw this work, he traveled upstate to woo Moses, ultimately becoming her exclusive representative. Black Horses records a memory from the Revolutionary War, when Moses’s great grandfather observed the British Army coming through the woods, unhitched his two black plow horses, and rode one off to warn the colonial army. The Moses family’s longstanding roots in the United States established her as a Mayflower descendent and made her a more conservative choice for representing Americanness in the postwar period.

John Kane
American, born Scotland, 1860–1934
Scene From The Scottish Highlands, ca. 1927
Oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, gift of G. David ThompsonJohn Kane frequently painted scenes from the Scottish American festivals that he attended in Kennywood Park, located just outside of Pittsburgh. Cast in the dusty green palette of the city’s rolling hills and smoke-filled skies, this painting of two jigging children charmed the artist Andrew Dasburg, who served on the jury of the 1927 Carnegie International and swore to vote every other painting out of the show if Kane’s was not accepted. Kane’s appearance shocked the local press who covered the event with headlines like, “Only Pittsburgher Admitted to International is a House Painter.”

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses
American, 1860–1961
Rockabye, 1957
Oil on Masonite
Private collection, Galerie St. Etienne, New YorkMoses painted her own family in Rockabye. Hailed as the “grandmother of the nation” by major politicians including Vermont’s governor, Moses’s role as matriarch was fundamental to her mass appeal, which led to many commissions and licensing deals of her own from the booming industry of midcentury American advertising.

John Kane
American, born Scotland, 1860–1934
Larimer Avenue Bridge, 1932
Oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Patrons Art FundWhen it was completed in 1912, this Pittsburgh bridge set a record for the longest concrete arch span in the world. It is possible that Kane worked on the early stages of the Larimer Avenue Bridge, but an accident in 1901 that cost him one leg prevented him from continuing his patterns of working in Pittsburgh’s booming infrastructure, coal, and steel industries. Kane said that he became a painter during his next gig coloring railcars: “I learned the use of lead paint, the mixing of colors, the necessity of keeping colors clean and a deal else of information.”

Lawrence Lebduska
American, 1894–1966
Untitled (Horses and Snakes), 1936
Oil on canvas
Collection of Carl and Marian MullisHorses were a recurring subject for Lawrence Lebduska, who lived for some time on a cousin’s horse farm in Baltimore. His mixing of natural elements such as cacti, red rocks, green grass, and a snake patterned like a giraffe, as well as the scene’s staged wildness, also evidence his interest in dioramas from New York’s American Natural History Museum, which he visited frequently later in life. Lebduska was, like his father, trained as a stained-glass maker, a trade that may have influenced his experimental use of color, especially in the neon pastels he chose for the horse’s bodies.

Morris Hirshfield
American, born Poland, 1872–1946
Girl in a Mirror, 1940
Oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New YorkIn 1943, MoMA opened an exhibition of thirty paintings by Morris Hirshfield, which included this nude portrait of a woman with an unnaturally proportioned body perched on tiny, splayed feet. In the headline of his review, Master of the Two Left Feet, prominent critic Peyton Boswell poked fun at the awkwardness of Hirshfield’s feet, suggesting the artist only had access to left-footed shoe forms in the slipper factory that he once ran. Boswell also complained that self-taught artists were unfairly eclipsing other American artists: “While serious, professional artists fight for the recognition that means life to them, the Modern [MoMA] fiddles away its resources building a precious cult around amateurism.”