Fast Facts

Campus
Publications

College
Contacts

Davidson
In the News

Office of College
Communications

"To the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."
- Flannery O'Connor

For a long time now, a small network of art fanciers who love "crazy stuff" has nurtured a fascination for the neon-bright, hellfire-and-heaven canvases of a visionary alumnus of Davidson College. On January 22, 2002, they will reveal the fantastical art of the late Reverend McKendree Robbins Long to the rest of the world in a major exhibition of his work at Davidson College. And they can't wait to see the world's reaction!

One collector of Long's work, Barry Huffman from Hickory, said, "I hope they have a 'comments' book at the exhibition for people to write in, because I think the comments will be as wild as the Reverend's work!"

"He's not for everyone," admitted Brad Thomas, director of Davidson's Van Every/Smith Galleries and co-curator of the exhibition. "But he deserves this major retrospective. Rev. Long was a unique painter who has long been overlooked because he falls through the cracks between academic artists and 'outsider' artists."

Raised as the son of a state Supreme Court justice in a prominent Statesville, N.C., family, Long had an academic education in portrait and landscape painting in New York and Europe. But he abandoned his brushes almost entirely beginning in the early 1920s to spend more than thirty years as an itinerant Baptist preacher. He returned to art in the final twenty years of his life to express his religious convictions on canvas, creating scores of colorful, compelling paintings based on the Book of Revelation.

The exhibition, entitled Picture Painter of the Apocalypse, will include about thirty-five pieces from eight different collections, and will demonstrate the dramatic shift in Long's style from traditional portraiture to visionary art. He studied portraiture at the Art Students League of New York City, and won a scholarship to study in Europe, where one of his teachers was the famous portraitist Philip de Laszlo.

While Long's portraits were technically superb, they were not historically important. The coming exhibition will celebrate the fact that he rejected the stringent principles of his early training to create works from his heart and soul, unconcerned with either remuneration or public perception. From the mid-1950s until his death in 1976, he filled canvases with vivid colors, tormented sinners, joyous saved souls, mythical creatures, and famous 20th century figures in cavernous infernos. He portrayed himself and his family with Jesus Christ in paradise, and frequently included in his scenes an anonymous, lusty "Woman in Red" whom scholars have yet to identify.

The exhibition will be enriched with samples of the dozens of journals that Long filled with his sermons, religious ideas, poems, and hymns. Visitors will see handbills advertising his tent revivals, and hear actual recordings of his preaching.

The exhibition will be the most ambitious in the Davidson art department's forty-year history. Its importance is marked by co-sponsorship by the North Carolina Museum of Art, and production of a 120-page catalog. After it closes in Davidson on March 1, 2002, the exhibition will hang at the North Carolina Museum of Art from April 1-August 25. It is also scheduled for subsequent showings in Hickory, Asheville, and Wilmington.

"We've never produced a catalog except for the faculty show when we opened the Belk Visual Art Center in 1993," said Herb Jackson '67, the department's senior faculty member. "A show without a catalog becomes just a memory when it comes down. But in this case, the catalog will go out to museums and galleries everywhere, and create an enduring legacy and awareness of Rev. Long in the art world. Since Davidson College's name is prominent on it, it also becomes very valuable in establishing our presence in the region and nation."

The exhibition is a natural for Davidson, since the art department has a significant history with Long. Sixteen of his paintings are maintained in Davidson's permanent collection, and Herb Jackson curated a less extensive Long exhibition in the Chambers Building gallery in 1991.

The current effort reflects the enthusiasm and determination of gallery director Brad Thomas. Thomas, an artist in his own right, first saw Long's work in 1999 during his job interview at Davidson. Thomas recalled, "While touring the facility, Herb showed me Rev. Long's paintings in the Davidson collection, and the imagery was so unusual I started asking questions about it. It became more and more intriguing to me, especially when I found out no major retrospective had ever been done."

His curiosity ultimately led him into collaboration with David Steel, a curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art who was eager to scratch his own longtime itch about Long. Thomas became consumed with an endeavor more complex, exhausting, and exhilarating than he ever imagined. "Now I have a first-hand appreciation for sleepless nights, impossible deadlines, endless research trails, fruitless funding searches, the details of catalog production, and the tricky politics of working with collectors and critics!" he joked.

Thomas pursued Long's story for the past two years, interviewing relatives and consulting with collectors in Columbia, Raleigh, Asheville, Greensboro, Wilmington, New Jersey, and Nebraska, and examining nine cubic feet of the Reverend's writings at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Montreat.

Along the way he uncovered a wealth of information about Long's life, which he has compiled into a biography for the exhibition catalog.

All the effort has developed in Thomas a sense of ownership for the Long legacy. He insists that the exhibition will faithfully represent his personality and artistic vision. That means that the caterer for the January 22 opening will be "an authentic Southern eatery," and that wine will not be served. "The Reverend was a life-long Prohibitionist," Thomas said.

Long's life reads like a work of fiction. He is a paradox of well-heeled intellectualism and fist-shaking, foot-stomping, Southern fundamentalism. Born into Statesville's high society on July 20, 1888, his early interest in art became a part of a classical education that included instruction in Latin and Greek. But tragedy struck the family when McKendree was eleven years old. His seventeen-year-old older brother, Ben, Jr., died after accidentally falling under a boxcar at the train station in Chapel Hill. He lay trapped in agonizing pain for several hours before workers could free him, and succumbed a few hours later.

Ben had been very popular, and showed great promise to follow his father's path to success. His gruesome death led his distraught mother to wear only black for the next several years. She retreated from her many civic activities, and cried for hours at his graveside. Young McKendree was therefore affected not only by the loss of a brother, but by the loss of his mother's joie de vivre.

In 1907, after spending a year at Davidson College, where he was the arts editor for Quips and Cranks, he quit to pursue formal art training at the Art Students League in New York. A talented, ambitious portraitist, Long won scholarships to study in the best American and European studios. While living in London, his religious conviction grew, and he was re-baptized in an evangelical church.

He returned to his hometown in 1913 to establish himself as a portrait painter, but enjoyed only moderate success. In 1917 he left his new wife and young child to serve in the U.S. Army as a non-combatant in France during World War I, where he was further affected by the misery of dying soldiers. Following the war he decided to follow his heart into the ministry, and was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in 1922.

He held two pastorates, but gravitated into traveling ministry and found it suited his temperament better. He also came to find Presbyterian doctrines too confining, and scandalized his family with conversion to the Baptist church in 1935. He found a permanent spiritual home there, and thrived in delivering the word of God along the "sawdust trail," preaching a fiery gospel to congregations at tent revivals up and down the East coast and mid-West.

His skills as an orator were superb. One method of illustrating his points was to reference great works of religious art by the European masters such as Rubens and Caravaggio. That technique earned him the nickname "Picture Painter of the Gospel."

Even though he helped raise thousands of dollars at revivals for the Baptist church, he never accepted payment from the church or audience for his services. Grateful communities insisted on tributes such as food and clothing, which covered his basic needs. In his words, he wanted to "...glorify God by a free ministry."

But the practice did put financial burdens on his family. They were shouldered by his wife, who wrote for the local paper, and by his two sisters, who ran the very successful Dixie Dame Pickle Company.

After World War II and the onset of the Cold War, Long was more convinced than ever that the prophesies spelled out in the Book of Revelation were about to be fulfilled. He was now in his sixties, and unable to travel. So he retired to Statesville in the 1950s, and blended his latent artistic talent with his religious passion on hundreds of canvases. His objective was not to exhibit or make money from the sale of his works, but to express his evangelical convictions on canvas. He painted rapidly and compulsively. When he finished one painting, he simply stacked it up against the wall of his studio, oftentimes still wet. His grandson, the fresco painter Ben Long IV, remembers Long beginning to paint on blank canvases without so much as a preparatory sketch. As he grew older, Long's pallet became more vivid and the subject matter more shocking.

News of the unusual paintings by the eccentric Reverend began to spread. A journalist wrote an article about him in 1961, a few days after his seventy-third birthday. The headline read "Minister Artist: He Begins a Mighty Big Task." The "big task" was to illustrate the Book of Revelation, because it was "...the most picturesque book in the Bible."

Long also described for the journalist the apocalyptic painting that many consider to be his masterwork. Referred to as Apocalyptic Scene with Philosophers and Historical Figures, it depicts a cavernous inferno in which the likes of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler are writhing in agony while others such as Darwin, Newton, and Wagner look on in fear, awaiting their own fate. Seated on a rock above the devastation is Long, and standing next to him is Dante. Both men seem to be delighted with what is transpiring below. In an aside to the journalist, Long stated that he was the "only person to ever make Dante smile." This work is now in the permanent collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The earliest public viewing of any of these works came in an exhibition at the Arts and Science Museum in Statesville in March 1962. The show focused primarily on Long's early works, but a number of the new apocalyptic works were included.

Long's family did not recognize his paintings as a unique contribution to the world of art, and following his death in 1976 were happy to sell rolls of canvases and stacks of panels. One savvy collector who took advantage of the bargain basement opportunity was Charlottean Max Jackson. Jackson recalled receiving a phone call from his friend, Milton Bloch, who was then director of the Mint Museum. "Milton told me, 'These are some of the most unbelievable paintings I've ever seen.'"

He and Bloch bought about eighty canvases directly from Long's daughter, who wanted to sell her late father's work to pay for her mother's health care. Jackson and Bloch began looking for other works by Long, and purchased several at flea markets and fairgrounds. Jackson loaned Davidson College some of the works from his collection for the show in 1991, and later donated several to the college.

Because he was not easily categorized in the art world, Long's work has been shown only in a handful of exhibitions since his death twenty-five years ago.

Show curator Brad Thomas explained, "His work is similar to better-known Southern outsider artists like Howard Finster and Eddie Owens Martin (Saint EOM), who also based their art on their dogmatic visions. But almost all 'visionary' artists are self-taught. Long is unique because his early training in the academic tradition provided him with skills to realistically render anything he could imagine onto canvas. That unusual combination meant that he fell through the cracks between the more celebrated worlds of traditional art and outsider art."

The two major exhibits in which Long's work was included were Signs and Wonders at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh in 1989, and The End is Near! at the American Visionary Museum in Baltimore in 1998. Both were thematic group exhibitions curated by Davidson College alumnus Roger Manley '74, who has been a national leader in the exhibition of outsider art.

Manley said he fell into his role totally by accident. It began during a miserable hitchhiking trip to the Outer Banks with a classmate during his freshman year. Cold and wet, thumbing in the rain, they were finally picked up by a driver who suggested that they might enjoy visiting with Annie Hooper if they were looking for something to do. Manley recalled, "We dried ourselves off at a laundromat and then walked on over to her house, which we found piled high with about 3,000 sculptures made of concrete and driftwood. It touched something deep in me."

Manley went back at Easter break to take pictures of Hooper's work, and began investigating other untrained artists. Following the trail throughout the region, he learned more and more about a style that became a nationwide obsession in the 1980s. In 1985 Manley and Tom Patterson curated a show entitled Southern Visionary Folk Art which was the first of its kind in the South. He has curated more than thirty such shows since then, including the inaugural show in 1995 at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, which has become the national museum for this genre.

Manley believes that Long's obsession to create puts him squarely in the realm of visionary artists, no matter what his training was. "The intense commitment to express himself, rather than following a traditional pathway, marks his work. But his traditional training did give him skills to say what he wanted to say better than a lot of folks who aren't trained."

Another key fan of Long's work is, strangely enough, the Curator of European Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Despite his title, David Steel holds an informal portfolio as the museum's staunchest proponent of folk art. A show on Black Folk Art at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington piqued his curiosity just before he moved to North Carolina to take his current job. Once he settled here, he gravitated into the "secret underground network" of folk art afficianados, like Patterson, Manley, Jackson, and the Huffmans. They shared information about artists like James Earl Jennings and Clyde Simpson, and visited them when possible. "It was fun because they hadn't been discovered, and their houses and yards were full of things," said Steel.

Steel was determined to get the museum involved, and found his opportunity when it scheduled a 1989 exhibition of folk crafts. He got the go-ahead to show works of folk artists from around the state as an auxiliary exhibition, and set out in earnest to search for suitable pieces. Steel and his friend Roger Manley started criss-crossing the state, asking postal workers and telephone repairmen if they knew of people who created folk art.

In the course of their search, they learned about the Rev. Long show by the Statesville Arts & Science Council. "When we tracked it down from that and saw it for ourselves, we knew it was great stuff," said Steel. "But McKendree Long didn't fit parameters of our show because we thought outsiders had to be self-taught. Still, we bent the rules a little and showed a couple of his paintings in Signs and Wonders."

As they learned more about Long, Steel and Manley talked extensively about doing a show devoted to his work alone. Davidson's 1991 exhibition added further fuel to the fire. Charlotte Observer art critic Richard Maschal wrote a glowing review of the show, and included a chapter about McKendree in a 1993 book he wrote about Rev. Long's grandson, the fresco painter Ben Long.

When Steel was able to acquire for the museum Apocalyptic Scene With Philosophers and Historical Figures, the painting many consider Rev. Long's magnum opus, he had yet another reason to do a show. "I kept thinking what a shame it was that very few people outside of few collectors knew about Rev. Long," said Steel.

Two years ago he learned that Brad Thomas was also considering a show about Long, and it didn't take the two of them long to get together. As the project took shape as a serious academic endeavor, they decided to accompany the show with the 120-page catalog. In addition to prints of the works in the show, the catalog will include three essays and a forward by Bill Ferris '64, recently retired director of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thomas is writing Long's biography. Steel is analyzing the paintings, and Charles Regan Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, is addressing the socio-political climate and religious fundamentalism in the South during the mid-twentieth century.

While the Book of Revelation was a common subject for "outsider" artists, Steel explained that Long's vision and training were far more sophisticated than most outsider artists. He used colors skillfully to create distance in his scenes, was able to organize multifigure compositions, and could render them with so much realism that historical figures like Kruschev and Einstein are easily recognizable. His intimate knowledge of scripture led him to create a literal translation of St. John's Revelation on canvas. Because St. John described seven lamps burning before the throne of God, Long painted all seven on his canvas, and did likewise with twenty-four elders and four beasts.

The contemporary characters convey Long's belief that the end was, indeed, near. The fire of God incinerates German soldiers in one canvas, while a Russian spacecraft falls, flaming, back to earth. "McKendree's view that it could happen right here, today, is something you don't see in the painting of other outsider artists," said Steel. "He represents a very interesting slice of Southern history and culture. His art wasn't something derivative of what was being done in New York or Europe. It was a unique product straight out of his experiences, beliefs, and imagination."

Perhaps Long's vision was summed up in the observations of the Southern writer Flannery O'Connor, who wrote, "The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural...to the hard of hearing you shout and to the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

Collector Max Jackson said he considers Long as a true Renaissance man. "Think of it! He wrote poetry, music, painted, and preached. He was the total Renaissance man," said Jackson.

Barry Huffman and her husband, Allen, were founding members of the N.C. Folk Art Society when it was created in 1988, and first discovered Long's work in the "Signs and Wonders" show. "I was blown away at the powerful imagery," she recalled. "I thought these works were hugely important, and determined then to gather those pieces I could and be a caregiver of this work."

The Huffmans are lending six works by Long from their collection to the show. "It's exciting to us," said Barry. "We believe in these paintings, that they're important to the overall history of North Carolina art."

The North Carolina Folk Art Society will convene at Davidson for its regular quarterly meeting on January 26 to see the show. Huffman believes his work, because it is more sophisticated than typical outsider art, will puzzle some people, and his subject matter will confound them. She said, "He defies easy pigeon-holing. He's going to make people think, and that's not bad."

Despite his comprehensive research and extensive writing on McKendree Long, Brad Thomas views the exhibition as just a first step in the art world's introduction to this fascinating figure. "Art students and scholars will follow us and begin exploring the many aspects of his life and work that we did not," he said. "They'll investigate things like the Hindu nature of his style, the Woman in Red, and interesting architectural rendering. There are also still many Rev. Long paintings unaccounted for somewhere out there in private collections, and maybe even dusty closets and flea markets. To me this exhibition is like an outline that begs endless elaboration."

He anticipates that the exhibition will arouse curiosity about Long, and induce a widespread appreciation for his work. The experience has already had a significant effect on Thomas himself. "All this time with Rev. Long has enhanced my outlook on life and changed me as an artist," said Thomas. "It's taught me that the only thing that matters in the end is to make the art you want, to live where you want, and be your own person--unique and whole. To follow any other predetermined doctrine is essentially a waste of time. That's what Reverend Long did. He could have settled into a predictable path of painting portraits at home in Statesville, but he followed his own heart instead."

Return to Recent Issues
Davidson Journal Archives

Davidson College Home