Grandma Moses and the Cold War

President Harry Truman was a prominent admirer: When the two met at an awards ceremony in 1949, he reportedly told the audience that he and Moses “were in complete agreement over ‘ham-and-egg art,’” his derisive term for abstract painting, then becoming increasingly favored. Truman would go on to welcome paintings by Moses into the official White House collection and, later, his own home.

Shown above is a photo of Grandma receiving Mademoiselle Magazine's Young Woman of the Year award, as Eleanor Roosevelt (Time's Woman of the Year) looks on. Another photo shows the Moses clan sitting on the Eagle Bridge War Monument as they waited for the train that brought Grandma home from Washington, DC.

I recently learned through the Smithsonian that Grandma became a government asset in the Cold War. The U.S. government wanted to project a rosy vision of America throughout Europe. Between June and December of 1950, a government-backed exhibition of Moses’ picturesque American scenes toured six European cities. At the U.S. Embassy in Paris in December 1950, works like "Here Comes Aunt Judith", depicting a family gathering at Christmas, were lauded by many. “It is a great pleasure to walk through such an exhibition, where the soul is devoted to the peaceful life in the quiet streets or in the warm interiors, in the midst of animals running loose or women working quietly,” one French critic wrote.

The idea that art could provide, as the late art historian Lloyd Goodrich put it, a “fallout shelter for the human spirit,” was a major motive behind the aggressive promotion of American art, music and literature across war-ravaged Europe.