Horace Pippin (1888-1946): Art, Race, and the Construction of American Modernism

FAIN: FA-251761-17

Anne Monahan
Unaffiliated independent scholar

Preparation of a book-length study on the American painter Horace Pippin (1888-1946).

Horace Pippin (1888–1946), a self-taught painter and disabled World War I veteran, was arguably the most prominent African American artist of the 1940s. My book, When Does a Primitive Cease to Be a Primitive: Horace Pippin’s Challenge to Art Criticism, examines his complicated position at the intersection of contemporary, African American, and self-taught art of his day, revealing unrecognized aspects of his criticality, agency, authorship, and patronage, and the dynamics of canon and racial formation operative in his success. Organized as a set of microhistorical case studies, the project sheds new light on a transitional moment in American modernism and the diverse constituencies involved in its construction and engages the fields of critical race studies, memory studies, literary criticism, sociology, and non-representational theory.

Associated Products

"Working My Thoughts More Perfectly:" Horace Pippin's Lady of the Lake (Article)
Title: "Working My Thoughts More Perfectly:" Horace Pippin's Lady of the Lake
Author: Anne Monahan
Author: Isabelle Duvernois
Author: Silvia Centeno
Abstract: This technical art history study—a combination of visual, scientific, and archival analyses rarely accorded the work of self-taught artists--argues that The Lady of the Lake indexes Pippin’s mounting ambition in the late 1930s, when he engaged and experimented with aesthetic conventions informing the art alongside which his own was increasingly exhibited. The resulting study opens the discursive horizon for The Lady of the Lake in particular and for Pippin’s sometimes recondite imagery in general; challenges the primacy of texts, including his titles and oft­-quoted statements, in interpretations of his art; and complicates assumptions about the relation of art’s margin and mainstream for him and his peers.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/mma-journals
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal
Publisher: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Horace Pippin, American Modern (Book)
Title: Horace Pippin, American Modern
Author: Anne Monahan
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300243307/horace-pippin-american-modern/
Primary URL Description: Publisher website
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300243307

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