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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, to Harriet Pippin; his father's identity is unknown. He grew up in and around Goshen, New York, but would return to West Chester in adulthood. In Goshen, 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. He apparently liked to draw the racehorses and jockeys from Goshen's celebrated, trotter (horse) racetrack. He was a member of church congregations, including St. John's African Union Methodist Protestant Church. 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. World War I In World War I, Pippin served in K Company, the 3rd Battalion of the 369th infantry regiment, known for their bravery in battle as the famous Harlem Hellfighters. The predominately Black unit faced a segregated US Army, especially before they were transferred to the command of the French Army. 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: "I have three wounds, two flesh wounds and one in the right shoulder and arm, splitting my shoulder blade in two places, and wrecking the socket of the right arm." Initially, the injury cost him the use of his arm and earned him a disability pension for life. While he eventually recovered much of his arm's function, he remained unable "to lift my right hand above my head without the aid of my left hand." (Presumably, mischaracterizations of that quote and a photo shoot from December 1940, illustrated above, are the sources of the erroneous, widespread idea that he had to move his right hand with his left to paint.) He was honorably discharged in 1919. He was retroactively awarded a Purple Heart for his combat injury in 1945. 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 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". Horace Pippin's War Notebooks, ca. 1920 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, Pa, where city directories from the mid-1920s list him as a laborer. The 1930 census lists him as a junk dealer, and he also reportedly made deliveries for his wife's laundry business. Pippin took up art in the 1920s and began painting on stretched fabric in 1930 with The Ending of the War: Starting Home. While 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," he revised his compositions extensively. 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. Brinton immediately organized a solo exhibition, cosponsored by the CCAA and the interracial West Chester Community Center, and then connected him with MoMA curators Dorothy Miller and Holger Cahill and, by 1940, the Philadelphia art dealer Robert Carlen and collector Albert C. Barnes. Pippin attended art appreciation classes at the Barnes Foundation in the spring 1940 semester. Carlen, Barnes, and, starting in 1941, dealer Edith Gregor Halpert played prominent roles in Pippin's career. 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 grew exponentially across the country and internationally. 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 institutions 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 annual or biennials at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well as thematic surveys at the Dayton Art Institute, Ohio; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey; and Tate Gallery, London, UK. In the catalogue for one of his memorial exhibitions 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's oeuvre includes a variety of subjects and compositional strategies. He began in the 1920s by burning designs into wood panels—mostly .... Discover the Sylvia Pippen popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sylvia Pippen books.