Primitivist Pippin

As a boy, Horace Pippin hung around the race track at Goshen, N. Y., sketching the trotters on odd scraps of paper. Later, as a husky moving-man, he used to ask for the job of crating people's paintings, so he could touch and study the oils. When a German sniper's dumdum bullet ploughed out a big hunk of his right shoulder in October 1918, after he had served 14 months in front-line trenches with his Negro National Guard company, Horace Pippin was invalided home as a total disability. But still he kept wanting to paint. Unable to raise his right hand to shoulder level, he propped it up with his left, painted that way in the tiny dining room of his home in West Chester, Pa. In three years he finished his first picture.

Last week, in Philadelphia's Carlen Galleries, Horace Pippin had his first one-man show. Writer of its catalogue note was none other than the terrible-tempered Dr. Albert C. (Argyrol) Barnes, owner of the finest private collection of modern art in the U. S. As a critic, Dr. Barnes is brusque but no booby. He compared Pippin's work to that of the most famed U. S. primitive painter, the late John Kane. Said he: "Kane is more romantic in spirit . . . but his work is less rugged, simple, picturesque and naive, and is inferior to Pippin's in variety. . . ."

War memories motivate many a Pippin canvas. One shows shell holes in the Champagne sector, bursting from the ground like monster morning glories. Another, End of the War--Starting Home, has grey-clad Germans holding up their hands in surrender, "because they had to quit before we could go home." Other ideas come to him from magazines, books, out of his head. A dozen people have bought his canvases, from Chester County socialites to Cinemactor Charles Laughton, who bought his Cabin in the Cotton (see cut).

Primitivist Pippin paints mostly at night, still works months on each picture. He and his wife (who calls him "Pippin") live happily on his wound benefit and the washing she takes in, always have turkey for Christmas, goose for New Year's, guinea fowl for their birthdays. Says Horace Pippin: "My opinion of art is that a man . . . paints from his heart and mind. To me it seems impossible for another to teach one of art."

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