Gatecrashers

After World War I, artists without formal training “crashed the gates” of major museums in the United States, diversifying the art world across lines of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender. At the center of this fundamental reevaluation of who could be an artist in America were John Kane, Horace Pippin, and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses. The stories of these three artists not only intertwine with the major critical debates of their period but also prefigure the call for inclusion in representations of American art today. In Gatecrashers, Katherine Jentleson offers a valuable corrective to the history of twentieth-century art by expanding narratives of interwar American modernism and providing an origin story for contemporary fascination with self-taught artists.

Katherine Jentleson, PhD, is the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Acknowledgments

ONE Modern Primitives and National Identity

TWO “The Most Truly American”
John Kane’s Naturalized Appeal

THREE Both New Negro and American
Horace Pippin’s Crossover Appeal

FOUR Goodwill Grandma
Anna Mary Robertson Moses’s Cold War Appeal

FIVE Expanding the Matrix of American Art

Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index