In ten paintings Horace Pippin explored biblical subject matter and spiritual themes. Although this work comprises a relatively small number (in comparison to Pippin’s overall artistic production of over one hundred works of art), several of these paintings – like the Holy Mountain series – are considered some of Horace Pippin’s very best works and represent an important, but rarely discussed, aspect of African-American visual expression: namely, modern religious art.
When one normally thinks of African-American religious art, the turn-of-the-century paintings of the expatriate artist Henry Ossawa Tanner immediately come to mind. If one were to think of modernist approaches to biblical subjects, then the works of African-American artists William H. Johnson, Allan Rohan Crite, or Romare Bearden might be more appropriate. Still, if one were to stretch the imagination and consider more community-based religious works, then an artist like James VanDerZee might surface, as seen in his staged and photo-negative manipulated church altar and funeral parlor photographs of the 1920s and 1930s.
It is unlikely that Pippin was familiar with paintings by any of these black artistic ancestors and relatives. Nor would he have been cognizant of their European and Euro-American counterparts, artists like Georges Rouault, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and other painters of religious subjects. Instead, his notions of religious art principally came from the common, mass-produced chromoliths that have illustrated Bibles, church vestibules, and African-American homes since the advent of inexpensive color lithography. As noted in the following description of decorations found in African-American homes, Pippin’s early concept of art would have certainly come from these select, Judeo-Christian themes and visual narratives:
Most of the pictures found [in African-American homes] were of a religious character, the subjects being such as St. John on the Isle of Patmos, Angels descending to the tomb of Christ, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Joseph with Christ in his arms, The Resurrection, The Fall of Jericho, and the Believer’s Vision …
“Biblical and Spiritual Motifs” (reprint), in Beholding Christ and Christianity in African American Art, ed. James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 136-143.
