Horace Pippin, Holy Mountain, I

Pippin’s dreamlike painting pairs a vision of biblical paradise with vignettes that recall the violence of the World Wars.

Horace Pippin, Holy Mountain, I, 1944, oil on canvas, 77.5 x 91.4 cm (Art Bridges, Bentonville). Speakers: Wendy Earle, Curator, Akron Art Museum, and Steven Zucker

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0:00:05.1 Steven Zucker: We’re in the Akron Art Museum. Looking at a painting by Horace Pippin. This is called Holy Mountain, I because it was the first canvas in a series. When we first look at the painting, it’s actually a little bit hard to see because so much of the background is so dark, but as a result, the figures in the foreground really stand out.

0:00:22.4 Wendy Earle: Most of the canvas is trees that cover it, and they’re very darkly rendered. So you have to look at the bottom third of the canvas, where all the action seems to be. And there’s clearly a shepherd figure here, and these creatures, some predators, some prey. And this is hearkening to a specific Bible verse, and that is Isaiah 11, “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child will put its hands into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

0:01:17.2 Steven Zucker: Horace Pippin, by all accounts, was a deeply religious man, and that comes through in many of his canvases. An essential figure, the shepherd, is a self-portrait of Horace Pippin, but Pippin was not likening himself to Christ, although he did say that he could see important truths, and he’s trying to render those here, I think.

0:01:36.3 Wendy Earle: That phrase, the wolf will lie with the lambs, has bled into pop culture, so we’re understanding that. But then as you look further, there are things that are harder to understand about this composition. What are these bird-like figures? Is this creature in shadow? Is that a bear? Is that a panther? What are these figures behind the trees? They look like soldiers. And then you look at the date, which is very specific, June 6th, 1944, the first day of the invasion of Normandy, otherwise known as D-Day.

0:02:07.0 Steven Zucker: There was tremendous risk in the world. There was tremendous violence. So the artist is creating a vision of this biblical Eden, of this biblical paradise, and wedding it to contemporary events and contemporary violence. And so this painting is visionary. It is looking to a kind of greater spiritual redemption.

0:02:31.1 Wendy Earle: Redemption as well as the afterlife, because in addition to the soldiers, we have what is most likely a temporary grave with a soldier’s helmet, and then a more permanent grave with the series of crosses. So is he saying that we are on earth, or is this an afterlife for him? And I think it’s left ambiguous.

0:02:53.3 Steven Zucker: Those images in the background are not as clear as I wish they were. We can clearly see the graves of soldiers in neat rows. But then on the right, we see figures running with guns, and then a figure who is doing what? Has he been wounded? What is that little almost tassel at the extreme right? There is this ambiguity. Are these continuous scenes? Are these separate vignettes in between the trees? It becomes almost dreamlike. It becomes almost surrealist in a sense.

0:03:20.1 Wendy Earle: You have to engage with it very close. You have to step in to be able to see some of these figures, and to try and figure out what’s going on. You see these dreamlike cycles of fighting and violence and death, which would probably be common for any artist who had gone through World War I, and then lived to see World War II.

0:03:42.6 Steven Zucker: The war aspect of this canvas must have been very personal to the artist. He was an active duty soldier during the First World War. He had enlisted and had been sent to France. He served under French leadership and saw extended military action, and in fact was a casualty of the war. He was badly wounded. His right shoulder blade was hit by an enemy bullet, and that was an injury that persisted so that, at least in his telling, he used his left hand to steady his right so that he could paint. Look at the gray trees to the right of the composition. They seem to have died. They seem to be in the tradition of 19th-century American painting, what is referred to as “the blasted tree” that became a signifier for the weather, for a kind of ancient form in the American landscape.

0:04:29.0 Steven Zucker: And here they do seem to symbolize a death that’s greater than their own. I think it’s important to address the fact that Horace Pippin had no formal training, and yet produces these amazingly complex and psychologically powerful images. This is an artist who clearly understood contemporary art history, and yet perhaps because he was African American and because he was self-taught, had been placed into the confining category of folk art, which was seen in the modernist tradition in the early and mid-20th century as both something that artists wanted to get back to, but also something that they were quite distinct from. Creating a kind of hierarchy that when coupled with racism in the United States, both served to celebrate this work, but also to place it apart.

0:05:15.3 Wendy Earle: It’s still something that artists struggle with. Once that label has been put on an artist, it’s incredibly hard to shake it. In a lot of ways it takes away the agency of the artist.

0:05:26.0 Steven Zucker: In fact, new scholarship has shown quite convincingly just how much agency the artist had, just how much thought he put into his work, and the ways in which he defies the category of folk art.

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Title Holy Mountain, I
Artist(s) Horace Pippin
Dates 1944
Places North America / United States
Period, Culture, Style Modernisms / Social Realism
Artwork Type Painting
Material Oil paint, Canvas
Technique

This work at Art Bridges

See an excerpt from Horace Pippin’s World War I memoir

Anne Monahan, Horace Pippin, American Modern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

Judith E. Stein, I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts in association with Universe Publishing, 1993).

Cite this page as: Wendy Earle, Curator, Akron Art Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker, "Horace Pippin, Holy Mountain, I," in Smarthistory, January 13, 2025, accessed February 17, 2025, https://smarthistory.org/horace-pippin-holy-mountain-i/.