Acknowledgments

Monahan, Anne

Save Cite Share

Free

Acknowledgments

Anne Monahan

Horace Pippin, American Modern

~~I started my career with I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin and have periodically revisited his work ever since, seeing it afresh as I mature. Now, after a quarter century, that relationship has culminated in a book buoyed by multiform gifts and kindnesses not too dissimilar from those...

Author

Anne Monahan

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20339

Acknowledgments

I started my career with I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin and have periodically revisited his work ever since, seeing it afresh as I mature. Now, after a quarter century, that relationship has culminated in a book buoyed by multiform gifts and kindnesses not too dissimilar from those described in chapter 4.

Wonderfully, the brain trust that developed around that retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) endures, even though we are now scattered from Maine to Michigan. Judy Stein jump-started this project with invaluable advice, files, images, and contacts. Mark Bockrath and Barbara Buckley, Susan Danly, Tim Gilfillan, Susan James, Barbara Katus, Serena Orteca, Gale Rawson, and Keith Chandler have fielded my queries with great patience and insight, and Sylvia Yount, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been an ally at every turn.

There would be no book—or at least not one this ambitious—without fellowships from the Phillips Collection–George Washington University, the Met, and the National Endowment for the Humanities that gave me access to research material and time to work without distraction. Likewise, the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art funded key research trips, new photography, and the color reproductions essential to my argument.

At the Phillips Collection, Klaus Ottmann, Eliza French, and Elsa Smithgall were not only gracious hosts but also excellent matchmakers, pairing me with interns Carter Lyon, Zenia Simpson, and Jacqueline Snyder, whose efforts laid the foundation for my analysis. A delightful bonus of my year in Washington has been time with Lynne Cooke, who always spurs me to ask new questions. At the Met, Isabelle Duvernois and Silvia Centeno have been ideal research partners; Randall Griffey, Marcie Karp, and Pari Stave helped me capitalize on museum resources; and Kay Bearman, Marilyn Friedman, Rosalind McKeever, Eva Reifert, and Katharine Wright brightened that year in the library and since. Beyond those institutions, Eddie Chambers, Jacqueline Francis, Anthony Lee, Rachel Middleman, Bibi Obler, Sarah Kelly Oehler, and anonymous readers have advocated for my work and materially improved my analysis and argument.

So much of this research has taken the form of personal conversation. Jeffrey T. Sammons and John H. Morrow, Jr., tutored me on the 369th Regiment with unflagging patience, and Charlotte and Rick Martin educated me about calendar art. Sarah Brown, Jean Fugett, Jr., Alane Mason, David Mortimer, Ola Roy, Cuyler Walker, and William Woys Weaver shared insights about their respective grandparents, Robert Carlen, Joseph Fugett, Jane Kendall Gingrich, W. Averell Harriman, Josephine Williams, Carol Harriman Stewart, and Ralph Weaver. And Anne Irwin Hicks, Philip Jamison, Pauline Loper, Elizabeth Wade, and Jobie Webb shared memories of Pippin and West Chester in the 1940s. Blaise and Diane Fogg, Robert Gober and Donald Moffett, Mimi Gross, James and Ann Harithas, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley, and Janet Shein, among others, welcomed me into their homes. Still more, including C. Sylvia and Eddie C. Brown, Leon Hecht, and Harmon and Harriet Kelley, spoke at length by telephone and email.

Curators, conservators, and registrars have been unstinting with their time, memories, and records, including Valerie Rousseau, American Folk Art Museum; Sarah Oehler and Kelly Keegan, Art Institute of Chicago; Mary Sebera, Baltimore Museum of Art; Pat McCormick, Butler Institute of American Art; Ellen Endslow, Chester County Historical Society; Dean Gwendolyn Everett, Howard University Art Gallery; Jennifer Rigsby, Indianapolis Museum of Art; Katrina Rush, Menil Collection; Jenny Sponberg, Myron Kunin Collection, and Rebecca Shearier, Minneapolis Institute of Art; Charlotte Ameringer, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Jay Krueger, National Gallery of Art; Kathleen Foster, Alexandra Kirtley, Jessica Smith, and Mark Tucker, Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA); Elizabeth Steele, Phillips Collection; and Amy Hammond, The State Museum, Harrisburg.

Curator Audrey Lewis of the Brandywine River Museum of Art merits special recognition: her invitation to contribute an essay to Horace Pippin: The Way I See It helped me realize that I had more to say; her show reacquainted me with works I had not seen in decades; and her willingness to share so many images made this book feasible. Other institutional colleagues waived reproduction fees (see the illustration credits for a full list); of particular note are Julie Zeftel and Jeri Wagner at the Met; Sarah Suzuki, Museum of Modern Art; Barbara Katus, PAFA; Conna Clark, PMA; Michelle de Shazo, Phillips Collection; and Leslie Willis, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University. Similarly, Phil Alexandre and Marie Evans, The Alexandre Gallery; Bridget Moore and Edward de Luca, D. C. Moore; John Ollman, Fleisher-Ollman; Michael Rosenfeld and Zachary Ross, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery; Bruce Shelton; and Colton Klein and Charlotte Mitchell, Sotheby’s, have supplied photographs, made paintings available for examination, and combed through old files on my behalf.

Archivists Marisa Bourgoin, Archives of American Art; Barbara Beaucar and Amanda McKnight, Barnes Foundation; Pam Powell and Jasmine Smith, Chester County Historical Society; Ray Banas and Linda Wood, Free Library of Philadelphia; Ann Roche, Goshen Public Library and Historical Society; Mitchell Yockelson, National Archives and Records Administration; Hoang Tran, PAFA; and Conna Clark, PMA, have turned up information that no amount of searching on my part would have produced. The same can be said for staff at the Met’s Watson Library, especially Robyn Fleming and the angels of Interlibrary Loan.

At Yale, Amy Canonico has been a friend to this book from early on. Tamara Schechter brought it to her attention, and Raychel Rapazza managed the submission details with aplomb. Mary Mayer, designer Leslie Fitch, copyeditor Jane Friedman, and proofreader Noreen O’Connor wrangled the manuscript into a viable publication—no small feat considering Pippin’s penchant for unconventional spelling and mine for endless revision. They have made the process a pleasure.

I can see traces in these pages of my teachers Bill Oedel, Ann Gibson, and Monika Schmitter, and my students, especially those in seminars at Marlboro College, George Washington University, and the Bard Microcollege–Brooklyn Public Library. One of them, Laura Lancaster, made managing the rights and reproductions for this project look easy, which it was not.

This, my most recent engagement with Pippin, was catalyzed by my informal talk at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College and refined through feedback to papers at the Clark Colloquium Outside In: The Interface Between Self-Taught and Mainstream Art Practices in the U.S. in the Twentieth Century, at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; the Terra symposium Eccentric, Realist, Populist, Procedural: The Politics of Figuration in American Art, 1929–1980 at Humboldt University, Berlin; the CASVA symposium Boundary Trouble: The Self-Taught Artist and the American Avant-Garde at the National Gallery; the Fellows Colloquium at the Met; and a brown bag lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum/Archives of American Art. Portions of this book appear in modified form in the exhibition catalogue Horace Pippin: The Way I See It, ed. Audrey Lewis (Chadds Ford, Pa.: Brandywine River Museum of Art, 2015), and in the articles Monahan, Isabelle Duvernois, and Silvia Centeno, “‘Working My Thought More Perfectly’: Horace Pippin’s The Lady of the Lake,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal (December 2017); “I Rember the Day Varry Well: Horace Pippin’s War,” Archives of American Art Journal (Fall 2008); and the forthcoming “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals: Some Thoughts on Religion and the Modern Primitives,” in Boundary Trouble: The Self-Taught Artist and the American Avant-Garde, ed. Lynne Cooke, Studies in the History of Art Series (Washington, D.C.: CASVA/National Gallery of Art).

Friends—some already mentioned—and family have been a reservoir of wit, strength, and kindness. Jane Lyon was in Philadelphia at the beginning, and Charlene Korza has helped me pick up the pieces more than once. Joe Monahan comes through with invaluable legal advice whenever I ask, and Mary Monahan and Jorge Tacla mix a fine cocktail of insight and hospitality. Finally, my father thought this book was a good idea long before I did, and my mother’s laughter and prayer have speeded it along.

Previous chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()