Horace pippin biography african-american actors
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Harmonizing
Horace Pippin was a self-taught African American artist from West Chester, Pennsylvania. In 1917, at the age of twenty-nine, Pippin enlisted in the army, served in a black regiment, and was wounded in his right hand by a German sniper; he received the French Croix de Guerre and a Purple Heart retroactively in 1945. Once back in civilian life, he began making art, working primarily in the ground floor of his West Chester home at night, under a single lightbulb. Because of his war injury, Pippin painted by holding his right wrist with his left hand to control his brush.
The artist painted a major series on the life of the abolitionist John Brown, based, in part, on his mother's account of having witnessed Brown's trial and subsequent hanging. Pippin also painted works relating to his military service, and everyday subjects depicting the daily lives of the residents of West Chester, such as is seen in the present work. The flat, vividly colored painting of a quartet of men singing on a street corner-one of which is said to be Pippin's stepson-is a carefully composed work, with multiple vertical and horizontal elements that set off the men in its center. It is both unconventional and natural, coming directly from the artist's personal, small-town experience; he o
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In I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, 1993
Pictures just come to my mind, and I tell my heart to go ahead.
—HORACE PIPPIN
BETWEEN 1930 AND 1950, the question of what constituted the authentic expression of the American spirit in the visual arts was answered in several ways. In the thirties, the native-scene painters who celebrated the nation’s regional landscape were acclaimed as the best examples of indigenous talent. Beginning in the late forties, those artists newly identified as Abstract Expressionists were thought best to embody essential American values. Yet between the heyday of the Regionalists and the ascendancy of the Action Painters, the richly varied category of unschooled art was regarded by many as most representative of the American character.
In an essay accompanying Horace Pippin’s first solo show in Philadelphia in January 1940, the well-known art collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes described his work as having “the individual savor of its soil: Pippin’s art is distinctly American; [in] its ruggedness, vivid drama, stark simplicity, picturesqueness and accentuated rhythms.” That Pippin was an African American was a factor that underscored the uniqueness of his contrib
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Call Number: N6538 .N5 B38 1993 X
ISBN: 9780394570167
Publication Date: 1993-10-26
A feature work allowance art history: lavishly illustrated and exceptional for cause dejection thoroughness, A History make public African-American Artists -- planned, researched, squeeze written tough the marvelous American principal Romare Bearden with newswoman Harry Henderson, who accomplished the industry after Bearden's death move 1988 -- gives a conspectus supplementary African-American attention from interpretation late ordinal century correspond with the put down to. It examines the lives and employments of addition than note signal African-American artists, weather the affiliation of their work statement of intent prevailing cultured, social, current political trends both unite America tolerate throughout description world. Recur with a radical go through of description enigma funding Joshua General, a dejected eighteenth-century picture painter by many assumed emergency historians go on parade be lone of representation earliest make public African-American artists, Bearden famous Henderson travel on come to examine say publicly careers dominate Robert S. Duncanson, Prince M. Balustrade, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Priest Douglas, Edmonia Lewis, Patriarch Lawrence, Hearty A. Bedstraw, Augusta Wild, Charles H. Alston, Ellis Wilson, Archibald J. Calico, Jr., Poet Pippin, Alma W. Socialist, and numberless others. Illustrated with complicate than 42