Marine veteran Laurence Stallings, co-author of the celebrated play What Price Glory?, once wrote: ‘There were no chroniclers, no painters, no writers reaching greatness because of [World War I].’ One he overlooked was artist Horace Pippin, who found his first subjects — and suffered the grievous wounds that paved the way for his brief but illustrious career — in the trenches of France in 1918.

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‘When I was a boy I loved to make pictures,’ Pippin recalled, but it was World War I that ‘brought out all the art in me….I can never forget suffering, and I will never forget sunset… so I came home with all of it in my mind and I paint from it today.’

A disabled black veteran who taught himself to paint, Pippin overcame his handicap — as well as discrimination — to become an overnight sensation in the American art world in the 1940s. Many consider him to be the foremost self-trained American artist of the 20th century, a painter whose artwork is reminiscent of the work of Grandma Moses and Jacob Lawrence. Pippin’s paintings are characterized by simplified forms, flattened perspectives and an intuitive sense of color, composition and narrative, combining folk-art qualities with artistic sophistication. ‘Pictures just come to my mind,’ Pippin remarked, ‘and I tell my heart to go ahead.’

Born some 20 miles southwest of Philadelphia in West Chester, Pa., in 1888, Pippin was raised by his mother, a domestic worker. He spent his childhood in Goshen, N.Y., where he attended a one-room school, studied the Bible and showed artistic ability at an early age. Dropping out of school at the age of 14 to help support the family, Pippin took a series of menial jobs, ranging from hotel porter to warehouse packer. In 1917 he enlisted in the 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard, which was redesignated the 369th U.S. Infantry after the United States declared war on Germany on April 6. After training, Pippin’s all-black unit and its white officers were shipped to France.

The commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, General John J. Pershing, had earned his nickname ‘Black Jack’ as an officer in the 10th Cavalry and had a high regard for the black soldier’s fighting qualities, but he went along with the prevailing Army prejudices of the time. When the 369th arrived at Brest in December 1917, its troops were transported to St. Nazaire, where most of them laid railroad tracks and worked as stevedores. While standing guard duty on the outskirts of a community near the front lines, Pippin was forced to shoot a man — presumably a Frenchman — who failed to halt after being warned three times.

The reluctance of white officers to integrate American units was underscored when a request to make Pippin’s 369th part of New York’s all-white 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division was rejected with the comment that ‘black is not one of the colors of the rainbow.’ The French, however, had their own black colonial troops in the front lines and were willing to fight alongside black Americans as well. Pershing had previously agreed to supply the French with four infantry regiments, so the assignment of the 369th to the French Fourth Army enabled him to solve two problems at once.

The 369th was in the thick of the bloody Champagne-Marne and Aisne-Marne battles in the summer of 1918 and the costly Meuse-Argonne offensive that fall. Serving 191 days in the front lines — longer than any other U.S. regiment — the black troops never lost an inch of ground or had a man taken prisoner. The 369th’s stellar performance earned the entire regiment the Croix de Guerre from the French government. ‘We were good,’ Pippin wrote proudly, ‘good a nuff to go any place.’

In one of the few autobiographical accounts by a black soldier to come out of World War I, Pippin related his combat experiences in matter-of-fact terms. In copy books that he illustrated with pencil and crayon drawings of marching troops, soldiers wearing gas masks, exploding shells and aerial dogfights, he recorded nightmarish memories of war on the Western Front. In spite of erratic spelling and awkward grammar, Pippin’s memoirs (preserved at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.) vividly convey one doughboy’s response to the bone-chilling cold, ceaseless rain, constant gunfire, poisonous gas, confusion and bloodshed in and around what he dubbed ‘them lonely, cooty, muddy trenches.’

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