Everything old is new again: Grandma Moses and the colonial revival.

Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses is, or was in the 1940s and 1950s, a kind of icon of Americanism as much for who she was and what she remembered as for her paintings. She explained their subject matter in highly personal terms to anybody who asked. The paintings, as she told it, directly reflected her experience of life: a vanishing rural economy of small holdings and self-sufficiency, a memory rich in poetry, folk songs, recipes, and tales of an even more distant past lived by her grandparents and her great-grandparents in the green valleys of upstate New York. She told reporters about sleigh rides, making soap, sewing her own school dresses, and the true story behind ...