Horace Pippin has traditionally been characterized as an “outsider” artist because of the seemingly naïve style of his works. In fact, he did receive artistic training, and his manner of painting evolved as it did from necessity. Pippin’s right arm was permanently injured during his service in the armed forces in World War I. He found a rather ingenious way around his disability: by crossing his legs, he provided a raised support for his right arm, which he guided across the canvas with his left hand.

In 1937 Pippin’s art was discovered when the artist N. C. Wyeth noticed Cabin in the Cotton on display in a shoe-repair shop in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He encouraged Pippin to exhibit the painting at the Chester County Art Association, where it was seen by curators from The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1938 the museum exhibited Cabin along with works by other “primitives.” Pippin’s art also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, and Life magazines, and was displayed by influential commercial galleries in New York and Philadelphia. Pippin’s popularity with white audiences had much to do with their ideas about the “childlike” quality of blacks.

His style struck them as authoritative and honest. In Cabin Pippin depicted a bucolic scene with a grandmotherly figure, whose head is wrapped in a kerchief, and a small boy, who chases a dog while chickens peck in the yard. Beyond the crudely constructed cabin and barn is a field of white cotton, over which cottonlike clouds float. The painting seems to reference the close association, forged by slavery, between blacks and cotton, as well as the promise of heavenly rewards for earthly labors.

Perhaps inspired by a 1932 movie entitled “Cabin in the Sky,” Cabin in the Cotton allowed the artist to indulge his love of highly textured surfaces and strong color contrasts. The pigment is applied thickly in broad bands of color––white, black, green, and blue. The (white) art establishment, mistakenly believing Pippin to be a genuine “primitive,” would have assumed that the artist here was painting a scene he knew well. In fact, Pippin visited the South only once, and briefly (in 1925), and may never have seen an actual cotton plantation. A native of Pennsylvania, he lived there most of his life. Thus, Cabin can be seen as a warm and elaborate reverie, but a fantasy nonetheless. (KPB)