Designs on the Heart

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 Mosesfarmwife, 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 matterand 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 herand the art czars of New York openly despise her? Through the flood of Moses merchandisesplashed across Christmas cards, dishware, yard goods, and gewgaws of every kindMarling 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 Mosess 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 phenomenonin art and commerce alikeof Grandma Moses.