Horace Pippin (February 22, 1888 – July 6, 1946) was an American painter who painted a range of themes, including scenes inspired by his service in World War I, landscapes, portraits, and biblical subjects. Some of his best-known works address the U.S.'s history of slavery and racial segregation. He was the first Black artist to be the subject of a monograph, Selden Rodman's Horace Pippin, A Negro Painter in America (1947), and The New York Times eulogized him as "the most important Negro painter" in American history. He is buried at Chestnut Grove Cemetery Annex in West Goshen Township, Pennsylvania. A Pennsylvania State historical Marker at 327 Gay Street, West Chester, Pennsylvania, identifies his home at the time of his death and commemorates his accomplishments.

Early life

Pippin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1888.

His mother was Harriet Johnson Pippin, and his father was Horace Pippin, Sr.

and attended church at St. John's African Union Methodist Protestant Church.

In 1898, Pippin responded to an art supply company's advertising contest and won his first set of crayons and a box of watercolors. Before he enlisted to serve in World War I, he worked in a coal yard in Goshen, as a hotel porter at the St. Elmo Hotel in Goshen, as a mover at a storage warehouse in Paterson, New Jersey, and as an iron moulder in Mahwah, New Jersey. They were the longest serving U.S. regiment on the war's frontlines, holding their ground against enemy fire almost continuously from early April until the end of the war. The regiment as a whole was awarded the French Croix de Guerre.

In September 1918, Pippin was shot by a German sniper, probably during the capture of Séchault, which was part of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. As he later explained:

After the war, Pippin created four memoirs—one illustrated—that describe his harrowing military service in detail. He returned to war subjects periodically throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and later said that WWI "brought out all the art in me".

<gallery mode="packed" heights="220" caption="Horace Pippin's War Notebooks, ca. 1920">

File:Horace Pippen, Three Soliders on March, War Diary Notebooks.png|Three Soldiers on March

File:Horace Pippin, Soliders with Gas Masks in Trench, War Diary Notebooks.png|Soldiers with Gas Masks in Trench

</gallery>

Postwar life and art career

Immediately after the war, Pippin moved to Bellville, New Jersey with his brother and worked as a truck driver. The following year, 1920, he married Jennie Fetherstone Wade Giles, who had been widowed twice and had a six-year-old-son, Richard Wade. Pippin moved to his wife's home in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where city directories from the mid-1920s list him as a laborer. He addressed a range of themes, from landscapes and still lifes to biblical subjects and political statements. Some draw on his personal experience of the war or turn-of-the-century domestic life.

He was "discovered" when he submitted two paintings to a local art show—the Chester County Art Association (CCAA) Annual Exhibition—reportedly with the aid and encouragement of various locals, including CCAA co-founders art critic Christian Brinton and artist N.C. Wyeth. He inscribes on each a date significant from WWII. The Holy Mountain I is marked with "June 6, 1944", the date of the Allied landings at Normandy, known as of D-Day. The Knowledge of God is marked "Dec. 7 1944", the third anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lastly, The Holy Mountain III is marked "Aug 9, 1945", the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. The upper register is dominated by oversize figures representing symbols or concepts. At center, a White man with a sledgehammer—presumably, Mr. Prejudice himself—drives a wedge into the V. At left, a large, copper-colored Statue of Liberty raises her torch to light the way to freedom. Staring at her from the right is a broad, lighter-skinned figure dressed in red and holding a noose, while a hooded Klansman looms above him. The lower register is filled with smaller scale figures that are segregated by race, reflecting the contemporaneous situation in the military and, to a lesser degree, the war industries. On the left are Black uniformed military, a medic, and a machinist, most of whom face the viewer. Some have read the brown-skinned figure at center left, outfitted in an anachronistic WWI uniform, as a self-portrait. A similar group of White men fill the lower right quadrant, most turned to face their Black counterparts.thumb|center|Mr. Prejudice painted by Horace Pippin in 1943|alt=

<br />Pippin's genre paintings are among his most popular works; see, for example, the Domino Players (1943), in The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and several versions of Cabin in the Cotton. Some, including After Supper (–1939) and The Milkman of Goshen (1945), relate to his childhood in New York State. Views of the everyday activities of Black families "tended to be relatively invisible to the white masses" before the Great Migration, so Pippin's domestic scenes offered a privileged view.

Collections

Pippin painted about 140 works, many held in museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; the Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.

Exhibitions

Pippin was the first Black American artist to be the subject of a monograph, Selden Rodman's Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in America of 1947. He has since been the subject of major retrospective exhibitions, several scholarly books and articles, a book of poetry, and several children's books.

  • Horace Pippin. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., February 25–March 1977; Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, April 5–30, 1977; and Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pa., June 4–September 5, 1977.
  • I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, January 21–April 17, 1994; Art Institute of Chicago, April 30–July 10, 1994; Cincinnati Art Museum, July 28–October 9, 1994; Baltimore Museum of Art, October 26, 1994 – January 1, 1995; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 1–April 30, 1995.
  • African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 15–July 6, 2003 (included works by Pippen)
  • Horace Pippin: The Way I See It. Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pa., April 25–July 19, 2015
  • Horace Pippin: From War to Peace, Philadelphia Museum of Art, July 19, 2019 – June 21, 2021.

Notes

Sources

  • Barnes, Albert. "Horace Pippin." In Horace Pippin Exhibition, exh. cat., Carlen Gallery. Philadelphia, 1940.
  • Bearden, Romare. "Horace Pippin." In Horace Pippin, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection. Washington, D.C., 1976.
  • Bernier, Celeste-Marie. Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015.
  • Conn, Steve. "The Politics of Painting: Horace Pippin the Historian", American Studies (Spring 1997): pp.&nbsp;5–26
  • Forgey, Benjamin, "Horace Pippin's 'personal spiritual journey'", ARTnews 76 (Summer 1977): pp.&nbsp;74–75
  • Lewis, Audrey M. Horace Pippin: The Way I See It, exh. cat. Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pa., 2015
  • Locke, Alain. "Horace Pippin." In Horace Pippin Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat. The Art Alliance, April 8–May 4, 1947. Philadelphia, 1947.
  • Monahan, Anne. Horace Pippin, American Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
  • Monahan, Anne. Horace Pippin: Racism and War, exh. cat. The Trout Gallery (Dickinson College), Carlisle, Pa., 2021.
  • Monahan, Anne. "Horace Pippin's Self-Portraits," Yale University Press Blog, 22 February 2020.
  • Monahan, Anne, Isabelle Duvernois, and Sylvia A. Centeno. "'Working My Thought More Perfecty': Horace Pippin's The Lady of the Lake," Metropolitan Museum Journal, v. 52 (2017).
  • "Pippin, Horace." Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge, vol. 15. Grolier, 1991,
  • Rodman, Selden. Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in America. New York: Quadrangle, 1947.
  • Stein, Judith E. et al. I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin, ex. cat. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1993. For the full text of Stein's essay, "An American Original," see her website
  • Zilczer, Judith. "A Not-So-Peaceable Kingdom: Horace Pippin's Holy Mountain," Archives of American Art Journal, 41 (Jan 2001): 18–33, https://doi.org/10.1086/aaa.41.1_4.1557755

Further reading

  • Bryant, Jen. A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin. New York, 2013.
  • Harrington, Janice N. Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin. BOA Editions Ltd., 2016.
  • Horace Pippin links
  • Horace Pippin Notebook and Letters Online at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art