Horace Pippin,
Gas Alarm Outpost, Argonne
, 1931, oil on fabric, 22 x 30 inches
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"The last of Horace Pippin’s seven World War I pictures in private hands,
Gas Alarm Outpost, Argonne
depicts black doughboys on sentry duty behind the front lines. The subject was personal, but not necessarily autobiographical, for the artist, who volunteered in 1917 for the 15th Regiment of the New York National Guard, which became the U. S. Army’s 369th Infantry Regiment. Dubbed the Harlem Hellfighters, his black troop was attached to French command, deployed at the front in spring 1918, and awarded a Croix de Guerre for valor. While the regiment was marching up Fifth Avenue in a spectacular victory parade, he was recovering in an upstate military hospital from a permanently disabling shoulder wound that he incurred in the Capture of Sechault.
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Near the end of his life, Pippin famously asserted that “World War I brought out all the art in me.” Around 1920, just after his discharge, he wrote and illustrated a combat memoir (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution), and in 1930 he began figuring the war in oil, sometimes reworking the paintings for years. His revisions of
Gas Alarm Outpost, Argonne
’s sky (grey, then blue, then lighter blue) and rightmost soldier signal his sustained engagement with an image that would represent him in key exhibitions over his brief, meteoric career."
—Anne Monahan
