NOW ON VIEW: Elizabeth "Grandma" Layton
Cinderella, 1986, lithograph
The Museum recently rotated new works on paper into the Creating an American Identity exhibit. One work of particular note is by fellow Midwesterner, Elizabeth Layton, known to many as "Grandma Layton."
Layton was born in the small town of Wellsville, Kansas in 1909. Her father, Asa Converse, was publisher and owner of the local newspaper The Wellsville Globe. Her mother, May Frink Converse was the paper's featured columnist and poet whose standing column "Convers-ations" featured personal ruminations about everything from her dinner plans, to favorite novels to detailed tales about her daughter Elizabeth.
After a tumultuous marriage and five children, Layton eventually left her husband and, after the death of her father in 1942, became managing editor of the Globe. Although she was a steady and successful businesswoman she suffered severely from manic depression, and underwent electroshock therapy on thirteen separate occasions in an attempt to cure her violent mood swings. She continued to suffer bouts of extreme depression throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1976, at age 68, she enrolled in a drawing class, at the urging of her sister, taught by Pal Wright. Soon after, she began to create intimate self-portraits and drawings that touched on sensitive issues such as aging, women’s rights, AIDS, depression, nuclear threat and marriage, among others. Layton rejected the stereotypical image of a grandmother and engaged in a practice that served as a form of therapy, allowing her to release long suppressed emotions through the act of blind contour drawing. Layton once noted that through this process, where the artist looks at the subject rather than at the page, “Things pour into them [the drawings] which you get not by thinking but by feeling.”
In "Cinderella," Layton portrays herself as the title figurine, an aging Cinderella, and her second husband, Glen, as prince. Layton said “Fairy tales end. Cinderella and her prince get married and live happily ever after. Not necessarily so. He sits there, glued to the television set. She pouts, feeling neglected. She consoles herself with chocolates, romance novels, and the thought that she is a pretty little thing whose tiny pink foot slips easily into the treasured glass slipper.”
In 1992, Layton's work toured the United States through an exhibit organized by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art. The Springfield Art Museum hosted an exhibit of her work in 1996 titled, Elizabeth Layton: Drawing on Life.
See this work in our Musgrave Wing through November 2016.
Sarah Buhr, Curator