Pippin’s works are relatively small and painstakingly rendered with little, narrow strokes. 2 Pippins national debut came just a year later when four of his paintings were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Masters of Popular Painting. Although the exact circumstances surrounding his “discovery” are debated, during that year the art critic and Chester County resident Christian Brinton saw Pippins work and arranged for his first one-man show at the West Chester Community Center. Pippin’s paintings and wood panels depicting his war experiences and childhood memories were largely unknown beyond his immediate family and friends until 1937. Later he began adding oil paint and worked on fabric, overcoming his disability by using his left hand to prop up his right forearm. For years, his crippled right arm prevented him from drawing, but in the mid-1920s he started burning images on wood panels using a hot iron poker.
Pippin’s earliest extant works are six drawings that he made during his military service. Upon his honorable discharge in 1920, Pippin married and moved back to West Chester, where he supplemented his disability pension by working as a handyman and delivering laundry that his wife took in. His African American regiment was sent to France and soon after, Pippin was wounded in the right shoulder, leaving his arm permanently damaged. After completing the eighth grade he went to work, supporting himself with jobs as a porter, mover, and iron molder before enlisting in the U.S. Pippin employed tightly controlled brushstrokes and simplified forms to render his highly personal visions, such as this view of brick row houses along a street in his hometown.īorn in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Pippin spent most of his childhood in New York State. I paint it exactly the way it is and exactly the way I see it.” 1 A self-taught artist who completed his first picture at the age of forty-three, Pippin painted, in a bold, direct style, what he knew and observed. I don’t go around here making up a whole lot of stuff. “I paint things exactly the way they are,” Horace Pippin explained to a colleague while painting West Chester, Pennsylvania.