MONTGOMERY | Folk artist Mose Tolliver, whose self-/sportraits and vivid images of nature, people, animals and the female form, done in humble house paint, made him one of the leaders of the modern-day/s?outsider art" movement, has died. He was in his 80s.
The self-taught artist, who signed his work Mose T, died of pneumonia Monday at Baptist Medical Center East after years of declining health, family members said. Various dates have been given for his birth, with 1920 listed by some collectors and galleries. ?
Mose Tolliver?s lyrical visions of birds, flowers and women are sometimes nightmarish," a Washington Post critic wrote in 1982, when Tolliver?s work was included in ?
Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980" at the Smithsonian?s Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Tolliver began painting in the 1960s after being severely injured while working in a furniture factory.
He was said to have first gained notice when he hung his paintings on trees in his front yard and sold them for a few dollars to passers-by. Anton Haardt, author of ?Mose T from A to Z: The Folk Art of Mose Tolliver," was an early admirer and began buying his work and reselling it, getting it noticed by dealers.
?Mose and I became very close friends," she told the New Orleans publication Gambit Weekly. ?
...
I?d give all the money from the sales to Mose, and he would give me two paintings in return." ?
That was a landmark exhibition that opened the eyes of so many people, the catalyst to helping them discover that this was an art form that needed to be taken seriously," said Marcia Weber, a Montgomery art gallery owner. ?His work was influenced by what he drew from his life," said Micki Beth Stiller, a Montgomery lawyer and collector of Mose T and other outsider artists.
?He painted in a simple, naive, direct style of things from his life." His self-portraits over the years conveyed a range of emotions, she said, from the early years when he painted himself with a pipe to the later years when he included a crutch.
Some could be ?grotesque." ?
He had a fertile imagination," Stiller said. ?He had an array of imaginary animals.
" Mose T?s paintings can sell for thousands of dollars today and are in museum collections, including the Museum of/sAmerican Folk Art in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Daughter Annie Tolliver, an artist who uses a style similar to her father?
s, said relatives were still making funeral arrangements. Ross-Clayton Funeral Home in Montgomery, which was handling arrangements, did not have a confirmed date of birth. DRIVER Local Drivers for Dedicated Account Get home EVERY day!
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