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Horace Pippin worked out his particular method of burnt-wood painting, apparently unaware of the popular craft technique, as a way to achieve his artistic expression despite a physical handicap. A disabled U.S. Army veteran, Corporal Pippin of the 369th Regiment had fought and been injured in World War I, and, once discharged and back home, was unable to work other than by delivering laundry his wife took in and by gardening. His right arm had been paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet, and Pippin could not even begin to make use of it even in a rudimentary way until 1925. Eventually he worked out a process by which he could make a burnt-wood panel painting; he would prop his immobile right arm so that his right hand was balanced on his crossed legs, clasping a poker between his arm and his body. By holding the smoldering tip against a wooden panel and maneuvering it with his able left hand and arm, Pippin could inscribe lines and effectively “draw” into the wood. He would have to continually heat the poker and maneuver the panels in all directions so it was by no means a direct or easy process to complete his piece.
The Whipping, 1941 (also known as The Whipping Post, 1940), is one of about twenty burnt-wood panels by the artist. Pippin signed and dated it 1941, making it explicit that he was not showing something that he had directly witnessed. He was recalling stories told to him by his grandmother of pre-Emancipation times. “In working from the remembered experiences of others, Pippin creates a historical narrative that artistically renders the past meaningful. In the process, he imbues the experience with the enduring meaning in a new arrangement intended to evoke contemporary understanding.” [2]
This dramatic scene depicts three figures in a landscape that could be anywhere in the slave-holding South. A white overseer is shown in the act of whipping an enslaved African American, who is tied to a post. Another white male watches. The action takes place in a yard next to some log cabins, presumably slave quarters, but there is nothing to indicate if there are people inside, watching.
Pippin made incisions in the wood with his hot poker to establish his compositional elements, which he would later build up with layer upon layer of paint. There is a continuous incised contour line describing the body of the bound enslaved man, his hands tied at the wrist, the slump of his head onto his chest, his torso exposed to the whip, and the bib of his overalls fallen from the waist. The figure of the overseer in the immediate foreground was not completely outlined. The incised line describes the position of his body (shown in left profile) and his torso up to the shoulders, but not his head and neck, which are painted in. The horizon line is established as the ground plane on which a row of cabins sits, running the width of the composition. These buildings are of log construction, with doors and chimneys. One could assume that the man’s community of other enslaved persons live within those walls, and will be there after the white men depart, to gather up the bleeding and broken body and nurse him back to health if possible. Such action is suggestive of a biblical reference, as in Jesus’s crucified body being taken down from the Cross by his followers.
The most vibrant colors of this painting are red (the ground), white (clouds, white men’s skin and their shirts), and blue (the sky). Pippin did modify his white paint somewhat to create a pale flesh tone distinctive from the white of the overseers’ shirts. There is a very dark green area of small multiple brushstrokes painted over black to depict grassy areas adjacent to the red color of the swept bare earth. Pippin left the brown color of his wooden support unpainted to depict the skin of the enslaved man, the overseer’s belt and whip and the log walls of the slave cabins. The red, white & blue color scheme strongly suggests that Pippin’s painting is an intentional image about an aspect of our American past that is less than glorious.
What Pippin captures with great economy of line is the tension of the act in progress. The man holds the whip aloft in his upraised right arm with his left leg extended forward, poised to absorb the full weight of the body when he bears down with all his might with the lash. Strokes previously inflicted are seen in the red marks on the African-American man’s bared torso. The other white overseer, placed centrally in the background and directly in our line of vision, seems to have settled in to watch, implying that this torture will not end soon. There is no evidence of the white men’s boss, who would be the slave’s master, so it is unclear if the overseer is carrying out another’s sentence, or inflicting the whipping of his own accord. Pippin has thus created a complex and sophisticated image with several individuals complicit in this inhumanity: the two white males depicted and any white American viewer, who is thus directly confronted with the country’s legacy of slavery.
Katherine Jentleson, curator of the 2021 exhibition Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, noted that Pippin's The Whipping is a “haunting work” that is “perhaps the most powerful example of Pippin’s confrontation with America’s violent racial past.” She added, “It is a vital counterpoint to paintings he made that seem to romanticize cotton production in the antebellum South, such as the Art Institute of Chicago’s Cabin in the Cotton.”
Notes:
[1] Rodman, Selden & Carole Cleaver. Horace Pippin: The Artist as a Black American. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1972, pp. 72-73.
[2] Roberts, John W. “Horace Pippin and African American Vernacular,” Cultural Critique, no. 41 (Winter, 1999), p. 27.
ProvenanceDowntown Gallery, New York, NY [1]
Gerson de Revli [2]
David Y. Ellinger [3]
To 1973
Lee A. Ault (1915-1996), New York, NY [4]
From 1973
Reynolda House Museum of Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Lee A. Ault in 1973. [5]
Notes:
[1] Joan Durana Provenance Research, 1983. Also notation by Barbara B. Millhouse, copy in object file.
[2] See note 1.
[3] See note 1. Also as in Rodman, Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in American.
[4] See note 1. Also letter April 9, 1973, in object file.
[5] See note 4.
Exhibition History1941
Recent Paintings By Horace Pippin
Carlen Galleries, Philadelphia, PA (3/21/1941 - 4/20/1941)
Cat. No.18
1941
Exhibition Of Paintings By Horace Pippin
The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL (5/9/1941 - 6/14/1941)
Cat. No. 37
1942
Paintings By Horace Pippin
San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA (4/14/1942 - 5/3/1942)
1947
Horace Pippin Memorial Exhibition
The Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA (4/8/1947 - 5/4/1947)
Cat. No.60
As "The Whipping Post"
1972
Four American Primitives: Hicks, Kane, Moses, Pippin
ACA Galleries, New York, NY (2/22/1972 - 3/11/1972)
Cat. No. 50
1977
Paintings by Horace Pippin
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2/25/1977-3/26/1977)
Terry Dintenfass, Inc., New York, NY (4/5/1977-5/1/1977)
Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA (6/3/1977-9/5/1977)
Cat. No. 21
1982
The Hickory Museum of Art; Hickory, NC (10/1982)
1990 - 1992
American Originals, Selections From Reynolda House Museum Of American Art
The American Federation of Arts
Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL (9/22/1990-11/18/1990)
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA (12/16/1990-2/10/1991)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (3/6/1991-5/11/1991)
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN (6/2/1991-7/28/1991)
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX (8/17/1991-10/20/1991)
Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL (11/17/1991-1/12/1992)
The Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK (3/1/1992-4/26/1992)
1994 - 1995
I Tell My Heart: The Art Of Horace Pippin
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (1/21/1994-4/17/1994)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (4/28/1994-7/10/1994)
Cincinnati Art Museum (7/28/1994-10/9/1994)
Baltimore Museum of Art (10/26/1994-12/31/1994)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2/1/1995-4/30/1995)
1998
Masterworks by Twentieth Century African-American Artists
Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH (1/17/1998-3/1/1998)
The Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery, Columbus, OH (4/16/1998-6/13/1998)
2005
Vanguard Collecting: American Art at Reynolda House
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (4/1/2005 - 8/21/2005)
2005 - 2006
Paper, Leather, Wood: Materials and African American Art of the Twentieth Century
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (11/15/2005 - 4/16/2006)
2015
Horace Pippin: The Way I See It
Brandywine River Museum of Art (4/25/2015 - 7/19/2015)
2019
Portraits of the Artists
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (2/1/2019-8/4/2019)
2021-2023
Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America
High Museum of Art (8/212021 - 12/112021)
Brandywine Museum of Art (5/28/2022 - 9/5/2022)
Westmoreland Museum (10/30/2022 - 2/5/2023)
Published ReferencesEffinger, Marta J., "Two Masters with the Brush," Footsteps, African American History. May/June 2003: 17-21, illus. 20.
I Tell My Heart: The Art Of Horace Pippin. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1994.
Keny, Timothy C., Ed. Masterworks By 20th Century African-American Artists. Springfield, OH: Springfield Museum of Art, 1997: illus. Cover.
Millhouse, Barbara B. and Robert Workman. American Originals New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1990: 116-7.
Horace Pippin: The Way I See It. ed. Audrey Lewis. Brandywine River Museum of Art, in association with Scala Arts Publishers, 2015: 134.0
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories, with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 134, 135, 174
Monahan, Anne. Horace Pippin, American Modren. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020, page 90.
DepartmentAmerican Art
The Whipping
Artist
Horace Pippin
(1888 - 1946)
Date1941
Mediumoil on wood
DimensionsFrame: 12 7/8 × 15 5/8 in. (32.7 × 39.7 cm)
Canvas: 9 × 11 1/2 in. (22.9 × 29.2 cm)
SignedH. Pippin, 1941.
Credit LineGift of Lee A. Ault
CopyrightPublic Domain
Object number1973.2.1
Description“How I paint. . . The colors are very simple such as brown, amber, yellow, black, white, and green. The pictures which I have already painted come to me in my mind, and if to me it is a worthwhile picture, I paint it. I go over that picture in my mind several times and when I am ready to paint it I have all the details that I need. I take my time and examine every coat of paint carefully and to be sure that the exact color which I have in mind is satisfactory to me. Then I work my foreground from the background. In other words bringing out my work. The time it takes to make a picture depends on the nature of the picture. For instance the picture called The End of the War, Starting Home which was my first picture. In that picture I really couldn’t do what I wanted to do, but my next pictures I am working my thought more perfectly. My opinion of art is that a man should have love for it, because my idea is that he paints from his heart and mind. To me it seems impossible for another to teach one of Art.” [1]Horace Pippin worked out his particular method of burnt-wood painting, apparently unaware of the popular craft technique, as a way to achieve his artistic expression despite a physical handicap. A disabled U.S. Army veteran, Corporal Pippin of the 369th Regiment had fought and been injured in World War I, and, once discharged and back home, was unable to work other than by delivering laundry his wife took in and by gardening. His right arm had been paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet, and Pippin could not even begin to make use of it even in a rudimentary way until 1925. Eventually he worked out a process by which he could make a burnt-wood panel painting; he would prop his immobile right arm so that his right hand was balanced on his crossed legs, clasping a poker between his arm and his body. By holding the smoldering tip against a wooden panel and maneuvering it with his able left hand and arm, Pippin could inscribe lines and effectively “draw” into the wood. He would have to continually heat the poker and maneuver the panels in all directions so it was by no means a direct or easy process to complete his piece.
The Whipping, 1941 (also known as The Whipping Post, 1940), is one of about twenty burnt-wood panels by the artist. Pippin signed and dated it 1941, making it explicit that he was not showing something that he had directly witnessed. He was recalling stories told to him by his grandmother of pre-Emancipation times. “In working from the remembered experiences of others, Pippin creates a historical narrative that artistically renders the past meaningful. In the process, he imbues the experience with the enduring meaning in a new arrangement intended to evoke contemporary understanding.” [2]
This dramatic scene depicts three figures in a landscape that could be anywhere in the slave-holding South. A white overseer is shown in the act of whipping an enslaved African American, who is tied to a post. Another white male watches. The action takes place in a yard next to some log cabins, presumably slave quarters, but there is nothing to indicate if there are people inside, watching.
Pippin made incisions in the wood with his hot poker to establish his compositional elements, which he would later build up with layer upon layer of paint. There is a continuous incised contour line describing the body of the bound enslaved man, his hands tied at the wrist, the slump of his head onto his chest, his torso exposed to the whip, and the bib of his overalls fallen from the waist. The figure of the overseer in the immediate foreground was not completely outlined. The incised line describes the position of his body (shown in left profile) and his torso up to the shoulders, but not his head and neck, which are painted in. The horizon line is established as the ground plane on which a row of cabins sits, running the width of the composition. These buildings are of log construction, with doors and chimneys. One could assume that the man’s community of other enslaved persons live within those walls, and will be there after the white men depart, to gather up the bleeding and broken body and nurse him back to health if possible. Such action is suggestive of a biblical reference, as in Jesus’s crucified body being taken down from the Cross by his followers.
The most vibrant colors of this painting are red (the ground), white (clouds, white men’s skin and their shirts), and blue (the sky). Pippin did modify his white paint somewhat to create a pale flesh tone distinctive from the white of the overseers’ shirts. There is a very dark green area of small multiple brushstrokes painted over black to depict grassy areas adjacent to the red color of the swept bare earth. Pippin left the brown color of his wooden support unpainted to depict the skin of the enslaved man, the overseer’s belt and whip and the log walls of the slave cabins. The red, white & blue color scheme strongly suggests that Pippin’s painting is an intentional image about an aspect of our American past that is less than glorious.
What Pippin captures with great economy of line is the tension of the act in progress. The man holds the whip aloft in his upraised right arm with his left leg extended forward, poised to absorb the full weight of the body when he bears down with all his might with the lash. Strokes previously inflicted are seen in the red marks on the African-American man’s bared torso. The other white overseer, placed centrally in the background and directly in our line of vision, seems to have settled in to watch, implying that this torture will not end soon. There is no evidence of the white men’s boss, who would be the slave’s master, so it is unclear if the overseer is carrying out another’s sentence, or inflicting the whipping of his own accord. Pippin has thus created a complex and sophisticated image with several individuals complicit in this inhumanity: the two white males depicted and any white American viewer, who is thus directly confronted with the country’s legacy of slavery.
Katherine Jentleson, curator of the 2021 exhibition Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, noted that Pippin's The Whipping is a “haunting work” that is “perhaps the most powerful example of Pippin’s confrontation with America’s violent racial past.” She added, “It is a vital counterpoint to paintings he made that seem to romanticize cotton production in the antebellum South, such as the Art Institute of Chicago’s Cabin in the Cotton.”
Notes:
[1] Rodman, Selden & Carole Cleaver. Horace Pippin: The Artist as a Black American. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1972, pp. 72-73.
[2] Roberts, John W. “Horace Pippin and African American Vernacular,” Cultural Critique, no. 41 (Winter, 1999), p. 27.
ProvenanceDowntown Gallery, New York, NY [1]
Gerson de Revli [2]
David Y. Ellinger [3]
To 1973
Lee A. Ault (1915-1996), New York, NY [4]
From 1973
Reynolda House Museum of Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Lee A. Ault in 1973. [5]
Notes:
[1] Joan Durana Provenance Research, 1983. Also notation by Barbara B. Millhouse, copy in object file.
[2] See note 1.
[3] See note 1. Also as in Rodman, Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in American.
[4] See note 1. Also letter April 9, 1973, in object file.
[5] See note 4.
Exhibition History1941
Recent Paintings By Horace Pippin
Carlen Galleries, Philadelphia, PA (3/21/1941 - 4/20/1941)
Cat. No.18
1941
Exhibition Of Paintings By Horace Pippin
The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL (5/9/1941 - 6/14/1941)
Cat. No. 37
1942
Paintings By Horace Pippin
San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA (4/14/1942 - 5/3/1942)
1947
Horace Pippin Memorial Exhibition
The Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA (4/8/1947 - 5/4/1947)
Cat. No.60
As "The Whipping Post"
1972
Four American Primitives: Hicks, Kane, Moses, Pippin
ACA Galleries, New York, NY (2/22/1972 - 3/11/1972)
Cat. No. 50
1977
Paintings by Horace Pippin
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2/25/1977-3/26/1977)
Terry Dintenfass, Inc., New York, NY (4/5/1977-5/1/1977)
Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA (6/3/1977-9/5/1977)
Cat. No. 21
1982
The Hickory Museum of Art; Hickory, NC (10/1982)
1990 - 1992
American Originals, Selections From Reynolda House Museum Of American Art
The American Federation of Arts
Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL (9/22/1990-11/18/1990)
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA (12/16/1990-2/10/1991)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (3/6/1991-5/11/1991)
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN (6/2/1991-7/28/1991)
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX (8/17/1991-10/20/1991)
Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL (11/17/1991-1/12/1992)
The Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK (3/1/1992-4/26/1992)
1994 - 1995
I Tell My Heart: The Art Of Horace Pippin
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (1/21/1994-4/17/1994)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (4/28/1994-7/10/1994)
Cincinnati Art Museum (7/28/1994-10/9/1994)
Baltimore Museum of Art (10/26/1994-12/31/1994)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2/1/1995-4/30/1995)
1998
Masterworks by Twentieth Century African-American Artists
Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH (1/17/1998-3/1/1998)
The Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery, Columbus, OH (4/16/1998-6/13/1998)
2005
Vanguard Collecting: American Art at Reynolda House
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (4/1/2005 - 8/21/2005)
2005 - 2006
Paper, Leather, Wood: Materials and African American Art of the Twentieth Century
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (11/15/2005 - 4/16/2006)
2015
Horace Pippin: The Way I See It
Brandywine River Museum of Art (4/25/2015 - 7/19/2015)
2019
Portraits of the Artists
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (2/1/2019-8/4/2019)
2021-2023
Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America
High Museum of Art (8/212021 - 12/112021)
Brandywine Museum of Art (5/28/2022 - 9/5/2022)
Westmoreland Museum (10/30/2022 - 2/5/2023)
Published ReferencesEffinger, Marta J., "Two Masters with the Brush," Footsteps, African American History. May/June 2003: 17-21, illus. 20.
I Tell My Heart: The Art Of Horace Pippin. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1994.
Keny, Timothy C., Ed. Masterworks By 20th Century African-American Artists. Springfield, OH: Springfield Museum of Art, 1997: illus. Cover.
Millhouse, Barbara B. and Robert Workman. American Originals New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1990: 116-7.
Horace Pippin: The Way I See It. ed. Audrey Lewis. Brandywine River Museum of Art, in association with Scala Arts Publishers, 2015: 134.0
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories, with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 134, 135, 174
Monahan, Anne. Horace Pippin, American Modren. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020, page 90.
Status
Not on view