The titles announce new creature comforts, but these apartment blocks look just plain menacing. Later, when one can finally make out a few faces, the titles bring reminders of persistent racism. The past tense, attached now to voting rights, starts to sound dismaying. An older and more famous contemporary, Horace Pippin, also admired folk art. However, Pippin tried to bring sophisticated draftsmanship to simple conventions.
Religion has a central place as a source of common wisdom, black or white.
At his best, Pippin supplies a subtlety Lawrence lacks. His lighting has clarity and tonal variety. Ironically for a painter in search of past pieties, it echoes the best American artists of the 1930s. Pippin's self-deprecation, as a young soldier or old man on a park bench, is funny and disarming. Too often, however, as evident in a current well-planned retrospective at the Met, Pippin's innocence amounts to sentimentality.