ABSTRACT
The art of Horace Pippin poses grave challenges to how people appreciate and assess artworks in late twentieth-century America. A serious examination of Pippin’s place in art history leads them into the thicket of difficult issues that now beset art critics. His paintings are neither monumentalist in the modernist sense nor political in a postmodernist way. Yet his Emersonian practice—which sidesteps the sterile “quality versus diversity” debate—lends itself to establishmentarian abuse. The relative attention and support of the self-taught Pippin at the expense of academically trained black artists reflects this establish-mentarianism abuse. His works can easily be tarred with the brush of “primitivism,” even “exoticism,” highlighting his lack of schooling and his subject matter rather than the quality of his art. His art is a powerful expression of black spiritual strivings to attain self-conscious humanhood—to believe truly one is fully human and to believe truly that whites can accept one’s black humanity.
