After World War I, Pippin, who had no formal art training, wrote and illustrated memoirs of his combat experience in which his right arm had been permanently disabled. By the 1930s he was burning designs into wood panels and making paintings that found a ready audience in an art world then keen on self-taught painters. By his death in 1946, he had mounted solo shows in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, won prizes in important contemporary art annuals, garnered attention in the national and international press, and sold most of his 130 or so paintings, wood panels, and drawings to museums and influential collectors across the country. This tiny self-portrait is part of a group of eight of his works donated by Jane Kendall Gingrich, one of the socially prominent women on Philadelphia’s Main Line with whom the artist cultivated patronage relationships.
For artist Kerry James Marshall (American, b. 1955), writing in a foreword for a 2015 Pippin retrospective, this diminutive self-portrait "is a monumental statement of self-confidence." He continues, "Any artist would be happy to reach the level of maturity embodied in this small picture." Marshall also writes that Pippin’s work has often been caught in a trap because the work is seen only through the lens of being self-taught or "primitive," a characterization that scholar Cornel West has described as a double bind for the Black artist: one is either excluded from the canon because one is Black (read: inferior) or included because one is Black (read: primitive). For Marshall, following West, neither option leaves room for the artist to be "fully engaged with the theories and practices of modern art making."
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Artwork Details
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Title:Self-Portrait II
Artist:Horace Pippin (American, West Chester, Pennsylvania 1888–1946 West Chester, Pennsylvania)
Date:1944
Medium:Oil on canvas, adhered to cardboard
Dimensions:8 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (21.6 × 16.5 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Bequest of Jane Kendall Gingrich, 1982
Object Number:1982.55.7
Inscription: Signed (lower right): H. PiPPiN.
Jane Hamilton, later Jane Kendall Gingrich, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., New York, and New Jersey (by 1947–d. 1981; her bequest to MMA)
Philadelphia. Art Alliance. "Horace Pippin Memorial Exhibition," April 8–May 4, 1947, no. 40 (as "Self Portrait," lent by Mrs. Jane Hamilton, Washington).
Philadelphia. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. "I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin," January 21–April 17, 1994, unnumbered cat. (fig. 99; as "Self-Portrait [II]").
Art Institute of Chicago. "I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin," April 30–July 10, 1994, unnumbered cat.
Cincinnati Art Museum. "I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin," July 28–October 9, 1994, unnumbered cat.
Baltimore Museum of Art. "I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin," October 26, 1994–January 1, 1995, unnumbered cat.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin," February 1–April 30, 1995, unnumbered cat.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Direct Eye: Self-Taught Artists and Their Influence on Twentieth Century Art," June 19–October 18, 1998, no catalogue.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Looking At You," January 26–September 30, 2001, no catalogue (on view until August 29, 2001).
Orlando, Fla. Mennello Museum of American Art. "American Folk Art Masters," September 21, 2001–January 6, 2002.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," January 15–May 4, 2003, extended to July 6, 2003, no. 6.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "XS," December 6, 2011–April 15, 2012, no catalogue.
Chadds Ford, Penn. Brandywine River Museum. "Horace Pippin: The Way I See It," April 25–July 19, 2015, no. 27 (as "Self-Portrait [II]").
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art [The Met Breuer]. "Kerry James Marshall Selects: Works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art," October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017, no catalogue (p. 267 in "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry" exhibition catalogue).
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism," February 25–July 28, 2024, unnumbered cat. (pl. 47).
Selden Rodman. Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in America. New York, 1947, p. 85, no. 71, as "Self-Portrait II".
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan in Judith E. Stein. I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin. Exh. cat., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. New York, 1993, pp. 105–6, fig. 99 (color).
Anne Monahan in Judith E. Stein. I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin. Exh. cat., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. New York, 1993, p. 201.
Whitney Scott. "Outsiders on the Inside." New York Post (August 29, 1998).
Lisa Gail Collins inAfrican-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2003, p. 29, no. 6, ill. (color).
Lisa Mintz Messinger inAfrican-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2003, p. 27.
Joyce Henri Robinson. "Front and (Almost) Center: Some Recent Collections Shows." International Review of African American Art 19, no. 2 (2003), p. 52, ill., calls it "Self-Portrait".
Lowery S. Sims inBill Traylor, William Edmondson and the Modernist /impulse. Ed. Josef Helfenstein and Roxanne Stanulis. Exh. cat., Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Champaign, Ill., 2004, p. 38, fig. 5 (color).
Kerry James Marshall inHorace Pippin: The Way I See It. Ed. Audrey Lewis. Exh. cat., Brandywine River Museum. Chadds Ford, Penn., 2015, pp. 1, 167, colorpl. 27.
Audrey Lewis inHorace Pippin: The Way I See It. Ed. Audrey Lewis. Exh. cat., Brandywine River Museum. Chadds Ford, Penn., 2015, pp. 80, 87 n. 32.
Anne Monahan, Isabelle Duvernois, and Silvia A. Centeno. "'Working My Thought More Perfectly': Horace Pippin’s 'The Lady of the Lake'." Metropolitan Museum Journal 52 (2017), p. 96.
Josiah McElheny. "Horace Pippin's Paintings." The Artist Project: What Artists See When They Look at Art. Ed. Chris Noey. New York, 2017, pp. 146–47, ill. (color).
Randall R. Griffey inMy Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2018, pp. 22–23, fig. 11 (color).
Max Hollein. Modern and Contemporary Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2019, ill. p. 79 (color).
Anne Monahan. Horace Pippin, American Modern. New Haven, 2020, pp. 190–92, 195, 218, 246 nn. 109–10, figs. 111 (installed in Hamilton residence, ca. 1947), 112 (color).
"Behind the Scenes with Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway and Jane
Kendall Mason." Hemingway Review 40 (Fall 2020), p. 120 n. 15.
Darryl Pinckney. "'Who Shall Describe Beauty?'." New York Review of Books 71 (May 9, 2024), p. 20.
Horace Pippin (American, West Chester, Pennsylvania 1888–1946 West Chester, Pennsylvania)
ca. 1936–39
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