(piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
in painting storage.
We've pulled out a long metal rack filled with paintings,
and amongst them is a small painting by Horace Pippin
from 1943 called Mr. Prejudice.
- [Jessica] The painting is filled with various characters.
First and foremost, a white man wielding an ax above a V.
- [Steven] He's so menacing.
- [Jessica] He's looking straight out at the viewer
with creases in his brow and his mouth fixed in a frown.
- [Steven] He's been called by some critics an executioner.
You can almost image that ax coming down on somebody's neck.
And just at the seam of the V is a wedge
and a crack that he's producing.
- [Jessica] The wedge is not just driving a crack
through the V, it's really dividing
the entire canvas in two.
- [Steven] On the left side is the Statue of Liberty
painted in a dark brown,
and so clearly the artist is making a Statue of Liberty
who is black.
- [Jessica] At the very base of the V,
on the left is an African American machinist,
on the right is a white machinist,
with their backs towards one another.
- [Steven] This is 1943 in the middle
of the Second World War when American focus
was on its war production,
but there were racial divisions
that were undermining it.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signed a proclamation
which outlawed discrimination in wartime industries,
because he felt it was hurting the war effort.
- [Jessica] And that theme is then continued
at the base of the canvas,
and on the left, there are four African American figures
who are associated in some ways with the war effort.
We have a figure who's been interpreted as a doctor
wearing a face mask.
Some feel that it could be a soldier who'd been injured
in the war effort.
Then, there is a World War II Naval Officer.
Then, a World War II aviator.
And then next to him, and infantryman
from the First World War.
- [Steven] The artist, Horace Pippin,
had been part of the famous Harlem Hellfighters,
African American soldiers who actually spent
more time on the front lines than any other regiment
during the First World War,
and had enormous successes.
But there was racism in the American Army itself,
even during World War I.
So much racism against the Harlem Hellfighters
that the Americans eventually put those troops
under the command of the French.
- [Jessica] And Pippin was injured in the line of battle.
- [Steven] He was right-handed,
and it was his right shoulder that was wounded.
- [Jessica] He'd expressed an interest in art
as a young man, but had to work to support his family.
After his return from World War I with his injured arm,
he discovered that he could make art
by using his left arm to hold his lame right arm.
His left arm could guide it.
And then almost as a sort of physical therapy,
he became more and more proficient.
And then he really began working in earnest in the 1930's.
- [Steven] And then his celebrity grew.
His paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art.
- [Jessica] And people have pointed out
that the infantryman in this painting
has his right arm hanging rather limply by his side.
- [Steven] It's interesting that the group of figures
on the left are, with the exception of the sailor,
facing us, but they're opposites on the right side,
white figures are facing the African Americans.
The largest of those figures is also an aviator.
He has his arm extended, but he doesn't actually
seem to be reaching his hand out to shake.
- [Jessica] The African American Naval Officer
almost looks as though he would be shaking hands
with the aviator, but not quite.
- [Steven] But it's the figures about those men
that are the most chilling.
The figure in the red shirt with the black hat
stares with a menacing look towards the Statue of Liberty,
and he holds in his left hand a noose,
a reference to the lynchings,
especially that had taken place in the American South,
in the wake of the First World War.
- [Jessica] And perhaps even more chilling,
above him, is a figure with a white robe
of the Ku Klux Klan.
- [Steven] Both standing opposite
this black Statue of Liberty,
creating this powerful confrontation.
- [Jessica] There's also a diagonal relationship
between the figure who is wearing the garb
of the Ku Klux Klan paralleled in the lower left-hand corner
with the African American man who's also in white
who is wearing is wearing a mask across his mouth.
- [Steven] There is also the parallel
between the torch of Liberty and the noose
in the opposite corner.
And so this is a painting about stark contrasts.
Contrasts that made up the reality of African Americans
in the US in the years from the First
to the Second World War.
- [Jessica] There was tragedy in these soldiers risking
their lives for their country.
- [Steven] The heroism with which blacks fought
in the First World War, one would think would accord
them respect upon their return,
but historians see the rise of the Ku Klux Klan,
in the 1920's especially,
as a response to the return of black soldiers.
- [Jessica] And that's where we return
to the conversation of the V.
The V for Victory coming into the second world war
was a phrase coined by Winston Churchill
that took root in the United States,
particularly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor,
very prominent iconography.
In the African American community,
there was talk of having a double V,
a victory abroad,
but also the need for the victory at home against racism.
So this double V here inflated into a single V,
but in a sense it has that double meaning
of military conflict and racial conflict.
(piano music)