Horace Pippin

Let's get right to the point. Pay the $7 and see the Horace Pippin retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Museum of American Art, Broad and Cherry Streets). This may be the best art exhibition Philadelphia will see this year. Pippin is the real thing. His work may not be polished but it's completely honest and often surprisingly sophisticated in its design and use of color. Pippin is America's Henri Rousseau - if he doesn't validate the model of the self-taught artist, no one else ever will.

To mark Black History Month, the Reading Public Museum is introducing its audience to legendary folk painter Horace Pippin through a small survey show that illustrates the artist's principal themes - war images, portraiture, still lifes and especially scenes of black life. "In Search of Horace Pippin: Three Views" turns out to be a surprisingly strong presentation. It contains only 18 works, including three of the burnt-wood panels that got him started as an artist. However, the loans, from museums such as the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are strong.

Channel 12 describes The Art of Horace Pippin, which it will broadcast at 8:30 tonight, as a documentary, but that's stretching reality to the breaking point. This 30-minute program about the self-taught black painter from West Chester is really a promotional video for the retrospective exhibition of Pippin's work at the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In fact, a 10-minute version of the program is on continuous view in the exhibition, as an introduction to one of the most accomplished self-taught artists of this century.

Recently, two rare paintings done in 1930 by Horace Pippin were reunited at the Chester County Historical Society, which acquired the works 10 years apart. The most recent acquisition, known as The Bear Hunt II, has no dramatic story behind it. It was never lost. That makes it very unlike its creator, a West Chester painter whose career took off only a year after his work was "discovered" in a shoe-repair shop. The society purchased the work in June from a New York dealer, using funds donated by Penelope Wilson of Paoli.

We went to see Horace Pippin the other day, on a bracing afternoon when a hot button of sun beamed down after so many months of snow and gloomy rain. He is the self-taught West Chester painter, the wounded African American infantryman who found that World War I "brought out all the art in me. " He was a genial man. He peered out on the America of the 1940s, beyond the Detroit race riots, beyond the Klansmen's hoods, beyond another war, and could still see bright reason to hope.

When she was 8 or 9, in the 1960s, Jen Bryant learned to type by copying obituary material on the desk of her father, a Flemington, N.J., undertaker. In 2004, having already published more than a dozen books, she happened on a painting at the Brandywine River Museum by Horace Pippin, the late African American artist from West Chester. Bookend events. From her first childhood taste of writing to her latest children's book, A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin, published by Alfred A. Knopf in January.

Every young artist dreams of being "discovered" and taking the art world by storm. Horace Pippin wasn't discovered until he was nearly 50, but he conquered the art world of his time in one giant stride. Within a year, he had graduated from small-town painter to headliner at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). That was in 1938. By 1940, Pippin was known all over the country. Time and Newsweek wrote about his exhibitions. Hollywood stars such as Claude Rains, Edward G. Robinson and Charles Laughton were buying his paintings.

The vibrant and colorful paintings of Horace Pippin, on exhibit at the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, have often been characterized as a window into the heritage of black Americans in Chester County. Pippin, the grandson of slaves, captured the warmth and simplicity of everyday life in paintings such as Interior of a Cabin and Domino Players. But the scenes could have taken place anywhere. These folklore paintings, as well as Pippin's still lifes, portraits and landscapes of rural Pennsylvania, made him practically an overnight sensation.

The considerable attention being paid to the Horace Pippin retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts obscures the fact that it's not the only major exhibition of folk art in town. The other one, at Moore College of Art and Design through March 27, features relief sculptures by the late Elijah Pierce (1892-1984). Like Pippin, Pierce was a self-taught African American artist. Unlike Pippin, who painted, Pierce was a carver. The Moore exhibition consists of 100 carvings, most of them painted reliefs, made over a 70-year career.

Local artist Beth Clark Graham (right) helps Hillsdale Elementary students (from left) Sharon Lee, Shanees Milbourne and Brendan Graham put a wood frame around a mural. Students created the mural as part of a lesson on artist Horace Pippin. The mural will be displayed in the West Chester school.

Film New this week: 56 Up (**** out of four stars). The eighth installment in the extraordinary doc series that began with Seven Up, profiling a group of British 7-year-olds, and revisiting them every seven years since. Although the respective stories are different, ultimately what is so compelling is the universality of the experiences. We were all once children. And we all will die. And in between, there is everything else. No MPAA rating (adult themes). - Steven Rea Music Sweet Honey in the Rock.

When she was 8 or 9, in the 1960s, Jen Bryant learned to type by copying obituary material on the desk of her father, a Flemington, N.J., undertaker. In 2004, having already published more than a dozen books, she happened on a painting at the Brandywine River Museum by Horace Pippin, the late African American artist from West Chester. Bookend events. From her first childhood taste of writing to her latest children's book, A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin, published by Alfred A. Knopf in January.

The stage production based on E.B. White's story Charlotte's Web continues at Broadway Theatre of Pitman. Charlotte the Spider, Templeton the Rat, and their animal friends try to save Wilbur the Pig from being slaughtered. Charlotte writes messages in her web to get the farmer's attention in hopes he will let Wilbur live.   "Charlotte's Web," 10 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday at Broadway Theatre of Pitman, 43 S. Broadway, Pitman. Admission: $9. Tickets can be purchased by phone, at the theater box office, or online at www.pitmanbroadwaytheatre.com . Information: 856-384-8381.

Jen Bryant lives in Chester County and is the author of "A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin," illustrated by Melissa Sweet In 1933, if you peered through the first-floor window of a certain plain brick house on Gay Street in West Chester, you might see a strongly built African American man, impeccably dressed in pressed white shirt and wool vest, his left hand grasping his right wrist, leaning toward his easel. His gaze is riveted, intense, as he applies from his palette, in thick, short strokes, house paint he's scavenged from the borough's alleys.

Visitors to the Barnes Foundation eventually discover that there's much more to its extraordinary display than its renowned groups of impressionist, postimpressionist, and early modern paintings. There is, for instance, a sizable body of American art that accounts for about a quarter of the works installed in the Merion galleries. One room, Gallery 12, is devoted entirely to the American artists Albert C. Barnes knew and collected in depth. Despite this, and the fact that at least two American works hang in each gallery, in the public's perception the American artists continue to be eclipsed by European stars such as Renoir, Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse.

Over three generations, the Wyeth family has produced five painters, three of whom have achieved national stature. Andrew, who died Jan. 16, became the most famous, not only for the remarkable longevity of his career but also because a number of other painters have trod in his stylistic footsteps. His older sister Carolyn, who died in 1994, was not one of them, although she, too, was trained by their father, N.C. Wyeth. Instead, Carolyn became the anti-Wyeth, both for her independent and sometimes rebellious personality and because her paintings often don't look very Wyeth-like.

Joy Feasley, a Philadelphia painter, and Clare Rojas, a San Francisco (and former Philadelphia) painter, have much in common. They're inspired by folk art, they often depict nature and animals in their work, and both were included six years ago in the ICA's "East Meets West: Folk and Fantasy From the Coasts," an exhibition organized by Alex Baker that revealed the influence of folk art on young Philadelphia and San Francisco artists. Now, the two have the second floor of Locks Gallery all to themselves.

Beth Heinly says she admires paint-pushing abstract expressionists like Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning. The 25-year-old artist also connects with neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and, more recently, with his pop mentor Andy Warhol, who she says has appeared in her dreams. This quirky pedigree can be detected in Heinly's super-casual, unframed marker-on-paper drawings at the Black Floor Gallery, but her channeling is entirely original. Heinly's deliberately awkward, Frankenstein-walk line and scrawling of blunt, graffitilike sentiments are reminiscent of Basquiat.

As Chester County has grown and changed over the last 25 years, the popular discussion among many residents has been the loss of the "old" Chester County: the loss of farms, the landscapes that vanished in favor of housing developments, and so on. Indeed, loss and change are real for many people in the county. For me, the "old" Chester County suffered an irreplaceable loss with the death on Feb. 17 of the artist Tom Bostelle. Bostelle was 83. He spent his entire life in the county, first in West Chester, then Downingtown, then Pocopson.

William Henry Smith paints stories. In his mind's eye, he sees three brothers gathered around a table. The oldest boy is teaching the younger ones to draw. Behind them stands Smith, holding a pipe, offering advice to his sons. This is Smith's next story, one he plans to put to paper this month. For Smith, whose career as an artist spans 65 years, the message is, "Let the kids draw. " "Give a child a box of Crayolas. If he doesn't eat it first, he will draw," said Smith, of Bristol Borough, who is preparing for an exhibition in Washington next year.