Horace Pippin (Carl Van Vechten)

This one is a threefer: painter Horace Pippin, photographer Carl Van Vechten, and printer Richard Benson. Van Vechten made striking portraits, chronicling the writers, musicians, athletes, and politicians of his time. Most notably he captured the stars of the Harlem Renaissance. Here’s Horace Pippin in 1940, the first Black artist to be the subject of a monograph (in 1947) and when he died 1946 the New York Times eulogized him as the most important Black painter in American history. Then, in 1980, concerned that Van Vechten’s fragile negatives were deteriorating, Richard Benson, in conjunction with the Eakins Press Foundation, transformed fifty of the portraits into handmade gravure prints. This is one of them. A beautiful portrait of an important artist.