When the Saint Louis Art Museum opens at 10 a.m. on Friday, December 18, it’s African-American holdings on display will be richer by one piece: “Sunday Morning Breakfast” by Horace Pippin, a 16 x 20 inch oil painting on fabric that will be installed in Gallery 337.
This painting is as recent a recent acquisition as you can get. The museum acquired it on the afternoon of Monday, December 14 and showed it to media the following morning, just a few days before it goes on public display. It was painted in 1943, a few years before the artist’s death following a stroke.
The museum has tried to acquire a painting by Horace Pippin (1888-1946) for “the better part of a decade,” museum director Brent R. Benjamin told media at a briefing on Tuesday. He said that Pippin’s work has been highly prized since the Museum of Modern Art included four of his works in its 1938 exhibition Masters of Popular Painting.
Melissa Wolfe, the museum’s curator of American art who led the acquisition of “Sunday Morning Breakfast,” said Pippin only produced about 140 works, so they are relatively scarce. The museum’s board of commissioners unanimously approved its purchase for $1.5 million from Alexandre Gallery in New York on Monday evening. Its first collector was the Hollywood producer and director Albert Lewin.
Wolfe said the painting fits particularly well in the museum’s collection, providing a stylistic bridge between two of its collecting strengths: the American Scene, best represented by Thomas Hart Benton’s “Cradling Wheat,” and Modernism, exemplified by Ralston Crawford’s “Coal Elevators,” both painted in 1938, the same year Pippin was introduced to the art world.
Pippin began to make art as a form of therapy after he was injured while fighting in World War I with Harlem’s Hellfighters, as the 369th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army National Guard was known. Other veterans from the unit included the tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Negro Leagues star Spotswood Poles and Benjamin O. Davis Sr., who in 1941 would become the first African-American general in the U.S. armed forces.
Naturally right-handed, Pippin was shot in the right shoulder by a German sniper in 1919 and lost the use of his right arm. As an artist, he would prop his right elbow on a poker, hold the brush in his right hand and use his left arm to manipulate his right hand and apply the paint.
“It was very laborious,” Wolfe said. “Some of his paintings are hundreds of layers thick.”
At first, he painted war scenes, with the laborious – in some sense obsessive – technique serving as therapy, “physical as well as emotional,” Wolfe said. He also painted domestic scenes drawn from his childhood, such as “Sunday Morning Breakfast,” which shows two small children being served at the table, presumably by their mother, as a man, presumably the father, puts on his shoes.
Wolfe pointed out the “beautiful balance” between the painting’s homey narrative content and its formal discipline, with the parallel vertical forms of a doorway, window and cupboard “anchoring the story.”
“On the one hand you have the American scene, storytelling, and on the other hand you have Modernism, the reduction of things to their geometrical essence,” Wolfe said. “This work beautifully bridges both of these.”
Admission to the Saint Louis Art Museum is free. Call 314-721-0072 or visit slam.org.
