‘Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work’
Edited by Leslie Umberger and Randall R. Griffey
Contributors: Erika Doss. Eleanor Jones Harvey, Stacy C. Hollander, Katherine Jentleson, Jane Kallir
Princeton University Press, 272 Pages

This book features a photograph taken at Christmas 1950 of actress Eve Arden and her two young daughters in front of a brick fireplace and several antiques with a Grandma Moses painting that looks like “Over the River to Grandma’s House.” This was not simply for show, but an homage to a painter whose work was first exhibited just as she neared age 80. An international sensation for two decades, a Life magazine cover celebrated her 100th birthday.

In her autobiography, Arden describes her pilgrimage to meet Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961), who “rarely portrayed specific individuals in her paintings, favoring instead a generalized group onto which we might project our own family stories,” as Leslie Umberger observes. That is exactly what Arden was doing, creating a home in modern Los Angeles filled with the emblems of a pastoral past couched in a celebration of family life.

Sometimes dismissed as merely the artist of nostalgia, Moses was so much more, re-creating the world she had lived in on the eve of dramatic transformation. She rarely chose specifically historical subjects, yet virtually every scene she painted evoked a world soon to be changed by modern inventions, dissected by trains and especially automobiles, which infrequently appear in her work.

Much is made of her avoidance of contemporary subjects, but as she said she was painting from the memory of horse-drawn carriages and sleds, plows and cultivators, families dressed in their Sunday best but also in the work clothes used not only to till the land but to bring in the laundry. Halloween, Christmas, July 4, and many other occasions — picnics and weddings — and a plethora of events and seasons are shown in vibrant colors throughout this stunning collection.

The essays are valuable forays into Moses’s life: her canny understanding of the art market; her remarkable autobiography that explores the roots of her esthetic, which began with her father painting and decorating his family’s houses; her shrewd business sense, making butter in post-Civil War Virginia that was better than anything her white neighbors could produce because they had lost the knack after delegating such chores to their slaves. 

The art historians in this book are keen to situate Moses in the history of modern art, showing how many critics disparaged her in the age of abstract expressionism, but also how others like a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe championed her in shows that led to her triumph at the Museum of Modern Art and in prestigious galleries. 

I’m a little surprised that none of the art historians treat her in terms of conceptual art, which is not meant to literally represent a world but to show it as the artist imagines it — in Moses’s case as a world sufficient to itself. Those critics who worried that she presented only an idyllic past seem to have missed the point. The paintings are memorials not to what once existed, exactly, but to a state of mind.

Many families in American cities were still experiencing what Moses depicted. In, say, 1955, my family would drive just a few miles beyond the Detroit city limits into what was then Warren Township, and we were in Grandma Moses country, with the cows and horses and other farm animals, and occasionally seeing an old car not so different from the vehicles that occasionally found their place in her paintings.

Of course the rural world was disappearing, yet it prevailed in Grandma Moses, painting three or four hours a day into the very last year of her life, telling stories to Edward R. Murrow on television, even as I sat with my grandmother nearing 100 telling me about what it was like in turn-of-the-century West Virginia. 

Grandma Moses maintained a bridge to the past — that covered bridge that is on fire in one of her paintings — and yet persists in others as a kind of conduit from one time to another that people of all ages, as in her art, relish in a time-travel sort of way.

Mr. Rollyson taught art history at Baruch College, the City University of New York, and is the author of “American Biography,” and a work in progress, “Our Eve Arden.”