BMA 1967.48

In Shell Holes and Observation Balloon, Champagne Sector, Pippin recalls an abandoned battle site. The earth has been ruptured by shellfire; the farmhouses have been cracked and torn apart. Footprints mark the path where soldiers once tramped. An observation balloon rises on the horizon. The entire painting is desolate, painted in black, white, and tones of gray. It seems that life on this patch of land is over and will never return.

Pippin kept a diary in which he recorded sketches and thoughts about his wartime experiences.

"...After a month's training learning the French rifle," he wrote, "the 369th was sent into action in Bois-d'Hauze, Champagne. We stayed there until July 4th, 1918. Our ranks were thinned by the deadly German fire. We were completely worn out...."

He went on to suggest why the shell holes feature so prominently in his painting:

"...At daybreak we were to start our advancement.... Men laying all over wounded and dead, some was being carried. We wished we could help the wounded but we couldn't. We had to leave them there and keep advancing, ducking from shell hole to shell hole all day...the snipers were plentiful. I remember spotting a shell hole and made a run for it. Just as I was within three feet and getting ready to dive in I were hit in the shoulder. There was four in the shell hole. One bound my wound the best he could and they all left me alone...."

Pippin's wound was severe enough to send him home with a partially paralyzed right arm. "I was discharged," he said. "My right arm was bound to me. I could not use it for anything."

The war had been a shattering experience to Horace Pippin. He would not have admitted it. He may not have "known" it. But the drawings, and to a far greater degree the war paintings that were to follow in twelve years, cannot be denied. He had seen the desolation of earth, the ruin of cities, the inhumanity of man.

After returning home to Pennsylvania, Pippin married a widow, delivered laundry, and did whatever other odd jobs he could find that didn't require two strong arms. Then, at about forty years old, he discovered that even with his crippled hand, he could make drawings on wood. He would grasp a white-hot iron poker from the stove in his stiff right hand, balance the poker on his knee, then holding a wood panel in his left hand, maneuver it against the smoking tip of the iron.

After making seventeen of these "burnt-wood" panels, he attempted painting. He found he could clasp a paintbrush in his deadened right hand, then use his left arm to push the hand and brush across the canvas. His first painting took him three years to finish.

Once Pippin started viewing himself as an artist there was no stopping him. Even with his disabled arm he often painted seventeen hours at a stretch. He painted memories of his childhood, events from the lives of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, and stories from the Bible. Altogether, Pippin painted seventy-five paintings during the last six years of his life.

Pippin had no art training whatsoever. He paid no attention to what was going on in the art world and placed no value on the advice of established artists. He made his art out of his own memories and his own observations. "Pictures just come to my mind," he once explained, "and I tell my heart to go ahead."

Art critics marveled at the way this unschooled or "naive" artist could produce works of such intensity. For Pippin there were no tricks, no rules:

"The pictures...come to me in my mind and if to me it is a worthwhile picture I paint it," he said. "I do over the picture several times in my mind and when I am ready to paint it I have all the details I need."