Horace Pippin
Horace Pippin (February 22, 1888 – July 6, 1946) was arguably the most successful African-American artist of the 1940s. The self-taught painter depicted a range of themes, from World War I, in which he served, to landscapes, portraits, and biblical subjects. Some of his best-known works address the U.S.'s  history of slavery and racial segregation.

A Pennsylvania State historical Marker was placed at 327 Gay Street, West Chester, Pennsylvania, to commemorate his accomplishments and mark his home where he lived at the time of his death.

Early life
He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and grew up in and around Goshen, New York. There, he attended segregated schools until he was 15, when he went to work to support his ailing mother. As a boy, Horace responded to an art supply company's advertising contest and won his first set of crayons and a box of watercolors. As a youngster, Pippin made drawings of racehorses and jockeys from Goshen's celebrated racetrack. Prior to 1917, Pippin worked as a hotel porter, a furniture packer, and an iron moulder.  He was a member of St. John's African Union Methodist Protestant Church.

World War I
Pippin served in K Company, 3rd Battalion of the 369th infantry, the famous Harlem Hellfighters, in France during World War I, where he was shot in the right shoulder. The injury initially cost him the use of his arm and always limited his range of motion. He said of his combat experience:I did not care what or where I went. I asked God to help me, and he did so. And that is the way I came through that terrible and Hellish place. For the whole entire battlefield was hell, so it was no place for any human being to be.

After the war, Pippin made a set of memoirs, including an illustrated one, that describe his military service.

Artist

Pippin took up art in the 1920s, reportedly in part to rehab from the war, and began painting in oil in 1930 with The End of the War: Starting Home.  He later explained his creative process: "The pictures which I have already painted come to me in my mind, and if to me it is a worth while picture, I paint it."

In 1937, he started exhibiting his work formally, with the support of the founders of the local art association, critic Christian Brinton and artist N. C. Wyeth. He soon attracted curators Dorothy Miller and Holger Cahill and, by 1940, the Philadelphia dealer Robert Carlen and the collector Albert C. Barnes. Pippin attended art appreciation classes at the Barnes Foundation in the spring 1940 semester.

One of his best-known paintings, Self-portrait of 1941, shows him seated at the easel. His painting of John Brown Going to his Hanging (1942) is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Among Pippin's work there are many genre paintings, such as the Domino Players (1943), in the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., and several versions of Cabin in the Cotton. His portraits include a depiction of the contralto Marian Anderson singing, painted in 1941. He also painted landscapes and religious subjects.

In the eight years between his national debut in the Museum of Modern Art's traveling exhibition “Masters of Popular Painting” (1938) and his death at the age of fifty-eight, Pippin's recognition increased on the east and west coasts. During this period, he had solo exhibitions in commercial galleries in Philadelphia (1940, 1941) and New York (1940, 1944), and at the Arts Club of Chicago (1941), and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1942). Private collections and museums such as the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, acquired his works. His paintings were featured in national surveys held at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dayton Art Institute, OH;  National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ;  Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. and Tate Gallery, London, UK. 
 
The last painting Pippin did before he died in 1946 was called Man on a Bench. In describing the work, Romare Bearden said: "the man, I think, symbolizes Pippin himself, who, having completed his journey and his mission, sits wistfully, in the autumn of the year, all alone on a park bench."

In 1947 critic Alain Locke described Pippin as "a real and rare genius, combining folk quality with artistic maturity so uniquely as almost to defy classification."

Artworks 
Pippin addressed a range of themes, from landscapes and still lifes to biblical subjects and political statements. Some images draw on his personal experience of the war or turn-of-the-century domestic life.    

His painting Mr. Prejudice, made at the request of an unidentified patron, depicts African-Americans and whites standing near front of the Statue of Liberty. Above the group of people, a Caucasian man can be seen driving a wedge between the two groups. Alongside him stands a member of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the men seems to be an African-American soldier dressed in a World War I uniform, which may refer to his service in that war.    

Pippin painted several religious subjects, both those illustrating Bible passages and more visionary statements like his biblical scenes and his Holy Mountain series.  

Pippin, who served in World War I and was at the apex of his career during World War II, painted war in a number of works. His first oil painting,The Ending of the War, Starting Home, depicts a military engagement resembling the assault on Sechault, in which he was wounded and his regiment was decimated.

Collections and retrospective exhibitions
Pippin painted about 140 works, many in museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Brandywine River Museum, 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.

Pippin was the first African 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 three major retrospective exhibitions and catalogues since his death:

 Horace Pippin. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., February 25–March 1977; Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, April 5–30, 1977; and Brandywine River Museum, 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. 
 Horace Pippin: The Way I See It. Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pa., April 25–July 19, 2015

Notes

Sources

Forgey, Benjamin, "Horace Pippin's 'personal spiritual journey'", ARTnews 76 (Summer 1977): pp. 74-xx
"Pippin, Horace." Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge, volume 15, copyright 1991. Grolier Inc., 
Barnes, Albert. "Horace Pippin." In Horace Pippin Exhibition, Carlen Gallery. Philadelphia, 1940.
Bearden, Romare. "Horace Pippin." In Horace Pippin, The Phillips Collection. Washington, D.C., 1976.
Locke, Alain. "Horace Pippin." In Horace Pippin Memorial Exhibition, The Art Alliance, April 8–May 4, 1947. Philadelphia, 1947.
Monahan, Anne. Horace Pippin, American Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
Rodman, Selden. Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in America. New York, 1947.

Further reading
 Bernier, Celeste-Marie. Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015.
 Bryant, Jen. A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin. New York, 2013.
Horace Pippin: The Way I See It, exh. cat. Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pa., 2015
I Tell My Heart:  The Art of Horace Pippin, exh. cat. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1993.
Monahan, Anne. Horace Pippin, American Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

External links
 Horace Pippin links
 Horace Pippin Notebook and Letters Online at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art