Horace Pippin

American, 1888–1946

BiographyHorace Pippin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on 22 February 1888. Three years later his family moved to the resort town of Goshen, New York. Pippin left school at age fourteen (in 1902) to help support his family, and by 1912 had moved to Paterson, New Jersey, where, over the next five years, he held various jobs as a laborer. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Pippin enlisted in the U.S. Army's 369th Colored Infantry Regiment. He fought along the front lines under French command, and was wounded in October 1918. After his discharge from the Army, he received the French Croix de Guerre in 1919; a Purple Heart was awarded him retroactively in 1945.

In 1920, Pippin married and settled in West Chester. As therapy for his injured right arm, he began drawing and, in 1925, burning images onto wood panels with a hot poker. He expanded to oil paints in 1928 and completed his first painting in 1930. His paintings were first exhibited locally in 1937; a solo exhibition immediately followed, and in 1938, four of his paintings were shown at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Over the next few years, Pippin's national reputation grew, riding the crest of enthusiasm for self-taught folk artists. His works were sought after by such renowned collectors as Albert C. Barnes (of the Barnes Foundation), and he became a significant figure in the mainstream New York art world. Pippin died of a stroke on 6 July 1946.

Hailed as exemplar and chronicler of African-American life, Pippin possessed an instinctive genius for color, composition, and form. His bold and forthright paintings--genre scenes, biblical and religious scenes, interpretations of historical events, landscapes, portraits, and still lifes--are both emotionally complex and thematically sophisticated.