RAI Book Launch – 23rd November, 5 – 6.30pm
Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Nottingham)
For self-made artist and soldier Horace Pippin— His ability to transform combat service into canvases of emotive power, psychological depth, and realism showed not only how he viewed the world but also his mastery as a painter. In Suffering and Sunset, Celeste-Marie Bernier painstakingly traces Pippin’s life story of art as a life story of war.
Illustrated with more than sixty photographs, including works in various mediums—many in full color—this is the first intellectual history and cultural biography of Pippin. Working from newly discovered archives and unpublished materials, Bernier provides an in-depth investigation into the artist’s development of an alternative visual and textual lexicon and sheds light on his work in its aesthetic, social, and political contexts.
Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of African American Studies at the University of Nottingham, England. She is the author of “Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination “, ” African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present“, and Visualising Slavery: Art Across the African Diaspora (Liverpool Studies in International Slavery)
