Designs on the Heart

The Homemade Art of Grandma Moses

Karal Ann Marling, Karal Ann Marling

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780674022263
• eBook ISBN: 9780674260894
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

It is a story that has gone down in the annals of American art history: a New Yorker visiting upstate Hoosick Falls is entranced by four pictures hanging in the window of a drugstore. Investigating further, he learns they are the handiwork of a 78-year-old widow. Thus begins the rise to fame of Grandma Moses—farmwife, painter, and unlikely celebrity.

In this book Karal Ann Marling, distinguished observer of American visual culture, looks at Grandma Moses as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period and explores the meaning of her subject matter—and her astonishing fame. What did the "Greatest Generation" see in her simple renderings of people, young and old, tapping maple trees for syrup, making apple butter, gliding across snowy fields on sleighs? Why did Bob Hope, Irving Berlin, and Harry Truman all love her—and the art czars of New York openly despise her? Through the flood of Moses merchandise—splashed across Christmas cards, dishware, yard goods, and gewgaws of every kind—Marling traces the resonances that these "primitive" images struck in an America awkwardly adjusting to a new era of technology, suburbia, and Cold War tensions.

Between the cultural ephemera, folklore, song, and history embedded in Moses's paintings and the potent advertising shorthand for Americana that her images rapidly became, this book reveals the widespread longing for the memories, comforts, and small victories of a mythic, intimate American past tapped by the phenomenon—in art and commerce alike—of Grandma Moses.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• To the Reader
• Prologue: Flying Over Quilted Landscapes
• Chapter 1. The Air Castle Years
• Chapter 2. The Old Oaken Bucket
• Chapter 3. Making Soap, Washing Sheep
• Chapter 4. Sugaring Off
• Chapter 5. Mother Moses “Discovered”
• Chapter 6. From Farm Wife to Media Darling
• Chapter 7. A “Primitive” Artist
• Chapter 8. Cakes and Cards
• Chapter 9. G. Moses, Inc
• Chapter 10. Grandma Is Very Old
• Epilogue: “Work, For the Night Is Coming”
• Notes
• Illustration Credits
• Index