'Suffering and Sunset': Horace Pippin's World War I Manuscripts and Paintings

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Horace Pippin (1888-1946) is the sole African American soldier serving in World War I to have created both a visual - consisting of both preparatory sketches and oil paintings - and textual archive comprising a series of untranscribed, phonetically written autobiographical fragments. The primary but not sole purpose of this project is to complete the research and writing of a 90,000 word book entitled, 'Suffering and Sunset: Horace Pippin's World War I Manuscripts and Paintings,' contracted to the University Press of Virginia and due February 2012. Based on archives held at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Chester County Historical Society, this book will not only consist of a 70,000 word monograph investigating Horace Pippin's life and works in relation to his World War I experiences but will also provide the first critical edition of his four unpublished autobiographies (a total of 20,000 words). Written with the aim of addressing his widespread neglect within art history, this monograph will recontextualise, retheorise and reexamine Pippin's life and works with a particular emphasis upon his World War I writings, paintings and illustrations. More particularly, this research will investigate his self-reflexive relationship to aesthetics, narrative, politics and history as he dramatised his 'life story of art' across diverse drawings, illustrations and oil paintings as well as his unpublished prose and correspondence. This study will begin by examining Pippin's importance as a World War I writer, particularly in diverse relation to a number of mainstream, primarily white, American artists turned diarists and autobiographers of the war as well as a rich array of under-researched African American autobiographers, poets, novelists and dramatists. The book will then analyse Pippin's World War I paintings in depth not only to extrapolate further from his insistence that art was a way to exorcise his 'blue spells' but also to re-evaluate his work in relation to his declarations of artistic independence as he informed his sponsors, 'Don't tell me how to paint.' Utilising key intellectual approaches by theorists of African American art history (Powell, hooks, Wallace, Stein, Wilson et al), this research will problematise popular representations of Pippin variously as an untutored naïf, a spiritual visionary and an indigenous painter. Another aim of this book will be to situate Pippin's oeuvre within the context of works produced by other African American artists (Edwin Harleston, Malvin Gray Johnson, William H. Johnson et al) similarly engaged in providing experimental representations of war and in resisting as well as signifying upon the political, intellectual and aesthetic influences of a white dominated art world. The book will then address the role of the white editor in relation to Pippin's manuscripts not only to confront the publishing difficulties which have beset African American authors for centuries but also to situate his work alongside other World War I texts produced by African American writers. Concluding with annotated typescripts including footnotes, a glossary and a bibliography, this book will aim to show that Pippin's dramatic canvases can be best understood in conjunction with his evocative manuscripts as they testify to his powerful conviction, 'I cannot forget suffering and I will not forget sunset.'