Over the next several years Pippin produced other war-related images by this same laborious process. Shell Holes and Observation Balloon (1935) replicates the mutilated terrain of the Western Front. In Dogfight Over Trenches, also painted in 1935, soldiers in a dugout watch aerial combat, a work inspired by the time Pippin saw a German plane crash in flames, leaving its two occupants looking ‘like mush.’ The victorious French pilot, the artist wrote, circled above ‘like a king over his great foe.’

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Military History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Painting those images offered Pippin a way of coming to terms with the trauma of war and perhaps purging his memory of it. While friends and neighbors were aware of his artistic efforts, no one took his vividly colored, naively rendered paintings seriously. Pippin occasionally bartered pictures for goods or displayed them for sale for a few dollars.

In 1937, one of his paintings was spotted in the window of a West Chester shoe-repair shop by famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth, who lived in the area. Wyeth soon helped organize a show of Pippin’s work, which was well-received. Within months, with the help of an aggressive Philadelphia art dealer, Pippin’s paintings were displayed in major museums.

Before long, Pippin was turning out depictions of African-American domestic life, portraits, regional landscapes, still lifes, historical vignettes and religious scenes. The paintings were eagerly sought after by wealthy collectors, including such Hollywood stars as John Garfield, Charles Laughton and Edward G. Robinson.

Pippin did portraits of several fellow veterans he met through American Legion activities. One showed Paul B. Dague, then deputy sheriff of Chester County and later the area’s congressman, in full Marine dress uniform. The leading local hero, retired Marine Brig. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, was profiled against a cloudy sky because, said the artist, Butler ‘was always looking for trouble’ during his military career. The feisty, outspoken general, who commanded U.S. Marines in Haiti in 1916 and China in the 1920s, liked the portrait; his only complaint was that it showed only 10 of his 19 medals.

As his reputation soared, Pippin traveled to exhibition openings, was interviewed by visiting journalists and entertained collectors. He continued to live in West Chester, working at night under the unshaded bulb in the parlor and often by day in the little garden behind his house (now identified by a state historical marker). Uncertain how long Pippin’s success would last, his wife continued to work as a laundress, much to the painter’s chagrin.

World War II was deeply troubling to Pippin. While staunchly supporting the war effort, he saw that racial discrimination threatened national unity, a concept he expressed in Mr. Prejudice, painted in 1943. The work portrays the sinister title figure driving a wedge into a V-for-victory sign, while an evil Ku Klux Klansman and a slave master, whip in hand, stand by to help. Arrayed against these malevolent forces are a black Statue of Liberty, black and white machinists working in harmony and an integrated group of military men from both world wars. In 1945, Pippin returned to a direct military theme in the evocative Barracks. Depicting four GIs in the compartmentalized isolation of segregated army quarters, Pippin captured the together-yet-alone atmosphere many soldiers experienced in the military.

Pippin was worried that intolerance and racial justice would reign in the postwar world. Inspired by Isaiah’s Biblical prophecy about the lamb and the lion, he conveyed his vision of how the world ought to be in three paintings of his ‘Holy Mountain’ series. In each, a white-robed black youngster, standing with a shepherd’s crook, oversees a peaceful gathering of lambs, lions and other animals. This tranquil foreground contrasts with the dark woods behind, where soldiers are fighting and tiny white crosses suggest military cemeteries. Each picture bears an important date from World War II: June 6, 1944, for D-Day; December 7, 1944, for the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor; and August 9, 1945, the day an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to