NEW YORK, NY.- Galerie St. Etienne will present Two American Originals, an intriguing pairing of Grandma Moses and Leonard Baskin, at the upcoming Winter Antiques Show at Park Avenue Armory, January 20-29, 2017. The exhibition will feature approximately 30 works, spanning the entirety of the artists’ careers.

At first glance, Moses and Baskin have little in common, but each addressed the anxieties of the Cold-War era, and the American public embraced them. Both transcended the boundaries of the art establishment, reaching people with work that spoke in different ways to the verities of the human condition. Baskin was the classically educated son of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Moses was a farmer’s wife with very little formal schooling. He, born in New York City, traveled widely. She seldom ventured more than a few miles from the family farm.

Grandma Moses is represented at the 2017 Winter Antiques Show by her paintings, the only medium she seriously pursued. Leonard Baskin was an accomplished pluralist, dedicating himself equally to a number of media. The gallery will present select drawings, prints and sculpture by Baskin.

Galerie St. Etienne has represented Anna Mary Robertson Moses since 1940, when it gave the artist her first one-woman show. Otto Kallir, founder of Galerie St. Etienne, titled the exhibition of bucolic landscapes What a Farmwife Painted. It was then that the 80-year-old artist became known as “Grandma” Moses. In 1946, Kallir edited the first monograph on the artist, Grandma Moses: American Primitive. The gallery, now led by Otto’s granddaughter Jane Kallir, along with Hildegard Bachert, Otto’s longtime associate, added the Baskin estate in 2007.

Grandma Moses Highlights
Blacksmith Shop, 1955, demonstrates the resourceful manner in which the self-taught artist Grandma Moses combined her observations of the rural countryside with images culled from magazines, newspapers, and calendar reproductions. Currier and Ives lithographs served as the painter’s substitute for art school. Many of the foreground details in Blacksmith Shop derive from the print Trotting Cracks at the Forge. Moses, however, interpolates the figures into an entirely original composition, and the vivid landscape background gives the image a remarkable immediacy. Such “activity scenes” are among the artist’s most popular subjects.

“Mt. Nebo” was Grandma Moses’s wry name for the family farmstead in Eagle Bridge, New York, and a reference to the Biblical mountain where Moses disappeared. Her depiction of it in this early work – oil on pressed wood – may predate the artist’s first exhibition at Galerie St. Etienne in 1940. The painting was purchased directly from Moses by the renowned collector Sidney Janis and given to his dentist in lieu of payment. Not only is Mt. Nebo, c. 1940, unusual in its recognizable depiction of the Moses home, but also the little old lady seated in the garden is probably a rare self-portrait.

Undaunted by the seasonal chill, the characters in Covered Bridge, 1944, represent a combination of productive work and joyful play. Covered bridges, while still in existence in rural New York, evoke a bygone era, and Moses often included them in her paintings. The artist is best known for her winter scenes, and collectors especially prize those with covered bridges for their romantic connotations.

Leonard Baskin Highlights
Leonard Baskin established his reputation in the 1950s with a series of monumental woodcuts—a technical feat not attempted by any artist since the Renaissance. Man of Peace, 1952, remains one of the fundamental emblems of the nuclear age, and impressions are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the British Museum, and other major public institutions.

Baskin’s woodcarvings, including Seated Figure with Bird, c. 1985, in laminated cherry wood, are exceedingly rare. The artist worked primarily in bronze, producing everything from pocket-sized medals to life-sized figures. Birds appear frequently in his work, symbolizing the duality of human nature: wisdom and rapacity.

Abraham, Isaac and the Angel, and the Ram, c. 1985, a sculpture in laminated walnut, depicts a parable from the Book of Genesis that Baskin found especially resonant. In the ultimate test of faith, God commands Abraham to slay his son Isaac as an offering, but at the last moment an angel stays the father’s hand, and a ram is sacrificed instead.