Asking Karal Ann Marling to write a catalogue for a museum exhibition—which is just what Paul D’Ambrosio of Cooperstown, New York’s Fenimore Museum, did—is a little like asking Jamie Oliver to fix a snack. That you will get anything less than a feast is unimaginable.
Anyone else commissioned to provide some commentary on Grandma Moses would have rehearsed the basics. A widow in upstate New York, Mrs. Moses began painting in her seventies. She specialized in scenes of rural America—snowy farmland dotted with red houses and picket fences—and pictures inspired by nursery rhymes like “Mary had a little lamb.” Moses gave her early paintings away as Christmas presents—to relatives, neighbors, and the postman—and hung a few up for sale, alongside jam, embroidery, and other fancy work made by local women, in the window of the W. D. Thomas Drug Store in Hoosick Falls, New York. Louis Caldor, an art collector visiting from Gotham, took a fancy to the pictures at once. He bought them all, and then went to the Moses farm to see if the artist had more. Caldor became a Moses evangelist, eventually getting three of her pictures included in a 1939 show on “Unknown American Painters” at the Museum of Modern Art. Caldor also introduced Grandma Moses’ paintings to Otto Kallir, who owned a gallery on West 57th Street. Kallir saw something special in Grandma Moses’ untutored art, and he agreed to host an exhibition, called “What a Farm Wife Painted.” Before long, the elderly widow was a star.
Marling—a stunningly astute observer of American visual culture, who, among other things, managed in her book As Seen on TV to make a serious scholarly argument about paint-by-numbers sets—goes far beyond basic biography. She provides all that information, of course—indeed, she even complicates the received wisdom that Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until her eighth decade. From her youth, Grandma Moses, then known as Sissy Robinson, loved making pictures, and demonstrated the flair for color that critics would later praise in her landscapes. She decorated her paper dolls, using berry juice for the lips and coloring the eyes with her mother’s bluing bag of indigo. As an adult, long before she began painting she made “worsteds”: needleworked scenes of cottages and pastures. During the 1930s, women all across the country embraced embroidery, and the people who enjoyed their work didn’t draw a great distinction between stitched pictures and painted pictures. So Grandma Moses’ late-in-life vocation wasn’t, in fact, a foray into a whole new realm. It was part of a lifelong interest in hue and texture, in making beautiful things.
But Marling’s real concern is that of the cultural historian: why did Grandma Moses’ paintings strike such a chord in mid-20th-century America? And strike a chord they did. Fans flooded Grandma Moses with mail, begging her to make them copies of her famous winter scenes. President Eisenhower owned a Grandma Moses original, and Cole Porter always traveled with a Grandma Moses snowscape; he said her paintings made his hotel rooms feel like home.
Manufacturers began reproducing her pictures, turning out thousands of prints and Christmas cards. Highbrow New York reviewers sometimes dismissed Grandma Moses’ work, but what they saw as artistic flaws—her lack of perspective, the simplicity of her color schemes—made her pictures “ideal for the clumsy color processes used on the covers of [newspapers’] Sunday rotogravure sections.”
If paintings weren’t your thing, you could buy dishes or fabric emblazoned with Grandma Moses’ art. Macy’s shoppers snapped up sets of four plates, bearing images of Catching the Thanksgiven [sic] Turkey, The Red Checkered House, Out for Christmas, and Jack ‘n Jill, for under $12. Savvy housewives could drape their sofa in a Grandma Moses slipcover and bury it in pillows made from the same fabric. Decorative arts magazines found that Grandma Moses fabrics—which had pleasingly anodyne names like “Williamstown” and “Childhood Home”—offered a welcome contrast to the stark lines of midcentury modern decor. A modern room, cooed one ad, “is warmed by its detail, enlivened by its quaint precision.” (You can still purchase these Grandma goodies. The dogged E-bay hunter can find not only prints of Grandma Moses’ paintings but also dishes, sewing boxes, and bedspreads decorated with her rustic icons.) Advertisers used images of her paintings to domesticate and sell everything from cigarettes to cosmetics. In 1946, the Richard Hudnut Company launched a lipstick and rouge in “Primitive Red,” coinciding with the publication of Grandma Moses: American Primitive. The lipstick was packaged in a red-and-white checked box, which had been inspired by Grandma Moses’ painting The Old Checkered House. A two-page magazine advertisement showcased a woman with bright red lips standing dreamily next to Grandma Moses’ Checkered House in 1860.
What about 1940s and 1950s America allowed Grandma Moses to become a national heroine, a symbol of all things American? Of course, her pictures of candle-dipping and soap-making and sugaring-off, a theme that was literally sappy, are the stuff of nostalgia. Grandma Moses’ simple evocations of farmwork and village life—her earliest New York exhibits included paintings with titles like Bringing in the Sugar, Apple Pickers, Backyard at Home, and The Village by the Brookside—found a ready audience in wartime America. This was the way of life for which American soldiers were about to begin fighting. In “a world gone mad,” argues Marling, Americans craved artistic reminders of simplicity and comfort: “Grandma Moses’ red sleighs dashing through snow-covered fields set the scene for the dearest dreams of the troubled American heart in the early 1940s.” And of course part of what the folks buying the mass-produced Grandma Moses dishware were nostalgic for was an age before mass production, an age in which ordinary men and women made their own candles and slaughtered their own Thanksgiving turkeys on their own farms.
The art and the artist also embodied a certain kind of femininity that seemed under threat during wartime. When Grandma Moses appeared at Gimbels’ Thanksgiving Forum, the department store advertised her appearance with this declaration: “She’s more than a great American artist. She’s a great American housewife. The sort of American housewife who has kept the tradition of Thanksgiving alive. Fussing with cranberry sauce may seem a bit useless in these turbulent times. It’s not. A woman … can fight to make the world a pleasanter place by perfecting her cranberries.” Women, in other words, didn’t need to become Rosie the Riveter to support the triumph of democracy over fascism. They could serve the cause of freedom simply by turning out a tasty cranberry sauce.
Grandma Moses also tapped into a midcentury conversation about aging. She became popular at a time when Americans were beginning to live longer and longer, and people increasingly worried about a growing population of the aged, who “were seen as a potential burden to society, draining away millions in pensions and health care costs.” (Sound familiar?) Grandma Moses presented an appealing picture of old age—she was still active, she lived in a tight-knit community, she was frugal. The nation celebrated her birthday each year with gusto; for her 88th, Norman Rockwell decorated a huge birthday cake with an adaptation of one of her winter scenes, and newspapers all over the country carried wire pictures of the two artists posed beside the remarkable confection. In these vicarious birthday fetes, ordinary Americans were celebrating not just Grandma Moses but also a vision of old age that was productive and healthy.
Like the best works of cultural criticism, Designs on the Heart will leave the reader saying “Of course! How could I not have thought of this before, it’s so self-evidently true? And yet, I would never have asked these questions or connected these dots myself.” And, like the best works of historical scholarship, it will leave readers asking new questions about our own cultural icons. Maybe next, Marling will turn her attention to Thomas Kinkade …
Lauren F. Winner is the author most recently of Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity (Brazos).
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