150889502Horace Pippin18881946Horace Pippin’s expressive paintings are instantly recognizable by their muted palette, dominated by gray, brown, and black, with brilliant accents of red and yellow. He meticulously built up layers of color, giving his works a tactile surface. He portrayed scenes of African American daily life that had been regularly overlooked in art history, alongside landscapes, floral still lifes, self-portraits, scenes of war, and major events of American history, including a series on abolitionist John Brown and another on Abraham Lincoln. Pippin was born in 1888 in West Chester, Pennsylvania; he and his family later moved to Goshen, New York, where he dropped out of school at fifteen to help his mother. During World War I, he served with the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment, better known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Just before the Armistice, he was wounded in his right shoulder in France and returned to West Chester. To strengthen his injured arm, he started decorating cigar boxes and burning imagery into wood panels using a poker iron. Then, around 1930, he began painting, first reflecting on his memories of his military service, which he also chronicled in illustrated notebooks. As he wrote in a letter, the war “brought out all of the art in me.” Due to his injury, he had to support his right arm, which held his brush, with his left hand while working at the easel. With the encouragement of the curator Christian Brinton, an early supporter of his work, Pippin participated in 1937 in an exhibition at the West Chester Community Center. His work quickly drew acclaim thanks to growing institutional interest in self-taught artists in the 1930s and 1940s. The following year, his pieces were selected for the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition <em>Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America</em>. In the catalogue, he described his process: “I take my time and examine every coat of paint carefully and to be sure that the exact color which I have in mind is satisfactory to me. . . . My opinion of art is that a man should have love for it, because my idea is that he paints from his heart and mind. To me it seems impossible for another to teach one of Art.” By the time he died, in 1946, he had created around 140 works and was considered a major figure of twentieth-century American art. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). HoracePippinhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3189/full(1888–1946)West ChesterWest ChesterWest ChesterWest ChesterWest ChesterWest ChesterHorace Pippin