With exhibition history dating back to its year of creation, 1941, at the Carlen Galleries, run by Robert Carlen, Pippin’s primary and only dealer, Man Seated Near Stove is an intimate example from his short career in which he is thought to have produced only about 140 paintings. Pippin was a self-taught artist, whose works painted between 1928 until his death in 1946 explored themes such as African American life, history, allegory, and the horrors of war. Painted at the beginning of his most fruitful period of the early 1940s, the present work offers a glimpse into some of Pippin’s most well-known techniques and subject matters which made him such an important figure of 20th century American art.

Measuring 10-inches square, the support of this painting is burnt wood-panel—a medium Pippin first began to use in 1925 when he started experimenting with pyrography, a traditional folk art form translating to “writing with fire,” in which images were “burned” into wood panels with a heated metallic instrument. Pippin took up artmaking like this when he returned from his time in the 369th Infantry Regiment in World War I, where he was shot in the right shoulder and became partially paralyzed in one arm. By supporting his weak right hand with his left, Pippin credited his creative process as a key part of his physical and mental recovery.

“Entirely self-taught, [Pippin] painted in a nonacademic, linear style that was characterized by a powerful sense of design and expressive use of color.”
—Robert Torchia

While this 1941 work recalls Pippin’s earliest explorations with pyrography, the introduction of vibrant paint colors is illustrative of his most mature works. As Albert Barnes espoused on the occasion of Carlen’s 1941 exhibition of Pippin’s recent works, featuring Man Seated Near Stove, “the evidence of his development in these panels consists in the use of bright, exotic, daringly-contrasted colors in the manner indicated above, and in embodying each panel an expression of his reaction to the work of earlier painters… ‘Man Seated near Stove,’ for example, recall[s] the forceful expressiveness of Daumier and Cézanne without resort to any technical device of either predecessor. Pictorial novelties of the highest order are achieved by incorporating as integral parts of the color-composition, appealing linear patterns formed by the natural grain of the wood and heavy lines of contour burnt into the panel.”

An influence on many African American painters of the 20th and 21st century that succeeded him, Pippin often used the natural color of the wood grain to render his subjects Black, as seen in this work and others including Supper Time, circa 1940, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. In Man Seated Near Stove, a Black man is depicted in profile view, seated in his kitchen. Even the figures in the painting of boxers behind him are Black, perhaps a reappropriation of the Boxer paintings by George Bellows made decades prior. By choosing to illustrate seemingly mundane scenes of African American home life, Pippin was meaningfully contributing to a changing landscape where for the first time, Black people in America were able to live their lives fully independently. As stated by one of Pippin’s greatest influences, Romare Bearden, and the art historian Harry Henderson, Pippin is “wholly an African-American artist. His life as an African-American is the basis of everything he painted," and his influence on the Black art community at large is still felt to this day.ii

i Albert Barnes in Recent Paintings by Horace Pippin, exh. cat., Carlen Galleries, Philadelphia, 1941.

ii Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, New York, 1993, p. 374.