Horace Pippin, American Modern

“Horace Pippin shines in the midst of an overdue racial reckoning in the United States, to which it makes a substantial scholarly contribution.”—Clara Barnhart, caa.reviews

“[T]his well-researched study challenges the continued classification of Pippin as a naïve outsider artist [and] expands our understanding of modern art in the United States.”—Rebecca VanDiver, Panorama: Journal of Historians of American Art

“To resist a purely biographical reading, Monahan's book replaces historical teleology with a thematic structure arranged in chapters...Nothing is taken for granted, and Pippin cyclically emerges and re-emerges out of a narrative driven by forensic readings of specific works, both iconographically and as visual reference to contemporary lived experience.”—Colin Rhodes, The Burlington Magazine

“This comprehensive study of Pippin absorbs previous scholarship but is perhaps the most thorough and inclusive analysis of a luminary and true original, briefly at center stage.”—Douglas F. Smith, Library Journal

“In Horace Pippin, American Modern, Monahan takes up the very issue of how we are to think about the artist now. . . . Focusing rather on certain aspects of Pippin’s work—on how he derived some of his images, on the meanings of his handful of pictures showing cotton fields, and on the way he often made gifts of his artworks to well-connected patrons—she attempts to remove what she calls the ‘homespun’ from our sense of the artist. . . . Monahan’s study is of a piece with a number of recent and forthcoming books that aim to show self-taught (or outsider) artists as more in control of their endeavors than previously thought.”—Sanford Schwartz, New York Review of Books

“An exceptionally rich and compelling reading of the artist’s life and work. . . . This is important work and Monahan does it well, challenging the hidden baggage of art historical discourse. Thoroughly grounded in original research and the close reading of the artist’s oeuvre, Horace Pippin is required reading for grasping the complex and complicated social practice of the history of art.”—Choice

“Horace Pippin, American Modern offers a fresh perspective on the artist and his moment that contributes to a more expansive history of art in the twentieth century.”—Antiques and the Arts Weekly

“Not only does Anne Monahan offer insights into the mind and methods of Horace Pippin, but she also gives us a rarely explored, comprehensive view into the inner workings of a burgeoning American art scene, an enterprise which relied upon this self-taught luminary for its own identity and advancement.”—Richard J. Powell, Duke University

“Monahan has achieved such an impressive sense of Pippin's internal developments and career-long motifs that she can adeptly shuttle between works, genres, and themes to build complex arguments about the artist’s cumulative impact.”—Jennifer Jane Marshall, University of Minnesota

“Monahan challenges the predominant narrative of Pippin’s life and work, convincingly demonstrating the problems of previous scholarship and providing sound evidence for her own.”—John P. Bowles, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill