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HORACE PIPPIN

I met Horace Pippin only one ocassion [[occasion]].  I was then thirty and he was about fifty-six.  It was near the end of World War II, and Pippin had come to New York City on an assignment for a woman's magazine, and had stopped by the Downtown Gallery to see Mrs. Edith Halpert, his New York dealer at the time.  Mrs. Halpert had already sponsored a well publicized exhibition on the 19th and 20th century Negro artists, that included a painting of mine.

I remember Pippin paid little attention to paintings of other artists hanging on the walls.  Not that he was indifferent, but he seemed otherwise absorbed.  When he spoke of his own work, however, he was quite animated and some of his comments were very humorous. What impressed me most though was how self-possessed Pippin was and especially how positive he was that his paintings were completely realistic This struck me as rather odd, because what I myself found most engaging in Pippin's work was precisely his distortions away from a photographic naturalism. I recall a work of his in the gallery that I greatly admired in which the floor was painted flat as if it were, let us say, a wall.  That the floor showed none of the recession of conventional perspective or the shadings and other attributes of exact representation didn't trouble me at all. I thought it just fine that Pippin had the innate judgement not to become absorbed with academic procedures that were not in keeping with his own vision and artistic personality.  His remarks though suggested that this was not the case.  at all.  To him these images were not distortions but perfectly literal translations of the actual world.

[[Ever]] the years having seen Pippin's work in their easily traceable

Transcription Notes:
I typed "inate" as "innate", incorporating the insertion. Not sure if I correctly used spaces when using the [[?]] feature.