Brandywine River Museum: New Exhibit Paints Horace Pippin In A New Light

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"John Brown Going to His Hanging", by Horace Pippin.

The story of one of West Chester’s most famous painters has been told many ways by many people, and a new exhibit opening this weekend in Chadds Ford paints the artist’s journey in a new light yet again.

The Brandywine River Museum of Art‘s new exhibit, “Horace Pippin: The Way I See It,” will be on display through July.

Horace Pippin's Self Potrait
Self Portrait, 1944

“The way Pippin’s story has been told has been through the white people who want to claim credit for his success,” art historian Anne Monahan said in a feature on Philly.com. “Pippin gets lost in that and is seen as a manifestation of their efforts.”

While credited with a resourcefulness that led to his success in the 1930s and 1940s, Pippin had never been praised for his own version of the journey until the 1990s, when curator Judith E. Stein retraced his brush strokes and reintroduced her new perspective to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

This new exhibit at Brandywine River Museum pays further homage to the artist’s own take on his paintings; in it, “he emerges more fully as a sophisticated captain of his own ship, confident and complex, said Audrey Lewis, curator of the show,” in the article.

Even if the analysis doesn’t quite match his own words.

Read much more about the many perspectives of Pippin’s life, including the more complex reading of his “most rending memories” of World War I, on Philly.com here.

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