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Ad Code: 4
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from Auction House Records.
Woman in a red dress looking out over a mountain valley
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  McKendree Robbins Long (1888-1976) was a Southern original, a larger-than-life character who could have stepped out of the pages of a Flannery O'Connor short story. Over the course of his eighty-eight years, he witnessed momentous changes in the world, especially in the American South, where he spent nearly all of his life. A painter, preacher, poet, and visionary, Long was passionate about life and about what he believed in, whether it was Prohibition, the need for a North Carolina art museum, or mankind's need for salvation through Jesus Christ.
The larger artistic community began to posthumously recognize Long's artistic vision when appreciation for "visionary" or "outsider" art expanded in the 1980s, but he does not fit comfortably into the traditional confines of that designation. However, Long's paintings do show that he turned his back on many of the tenets of his academic training to create a highly personal style that expressed his conservative beliefs about essential spiritual matters and about secular culture.
Long was the only son of a prominent Statesville, North Carolina family. His father, Benjamin Franklin Long, was a North Carolina Supreme Court Justice, and his mother, Mary Alice Robbins, the daughter of his law partner.
Long's artistic talents were encouraged by his doting family. After two years at Davidson College, Long left to devote himself exclusively to art, attending a summer art class at the University of Virginia. His artistic gifts must have been immediately apparent, for after only one semester of study, he was awarded a scholarship to attend classes at the Art Students League in New York, where a young Georgia O'Keeffe was also enrolled. The painter William Merritt Chase was the principal instructor there at the time, and it was he who probably encouraged Long's budding talents as a portraitist.
Long honed his skills at the League for three years before winning, in 1911, an award that allowed him to study in Europe for two years. He elected to study in London and also traveled to Holland and Spain to copy the old masters and develop his painting technique. In 1912, he entered a competition with a self-portrait and won a highly coveted appointment to study under the portraitist Philip de Laszlo.
During his stay in London, Long attended church at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, founded by the famous evangelist Charles Spurgeon, and it was there that he first began to feel a strong spiritual calling. However, his mother intervened and dissuaded him from abandoning his artistic studies for the ministry.
In the spring of 1913, Long returned to the U.S. and opened a portrait studio in Winston-Salem. His primary clientele were family members and friends, though he received some commissions from prominent North Carolinians through his father's connections. The following year, he married Mary Belle Hill of Statesville, the daughter of a physician. He enlisted in the Army during World War I and served in France as an ambulance driver. The war had a profound impact on Long. "You can't see men suffering and dying," he later remarked, "without undergoing a deep change."
Following his discharge, Long made one last attempt at a professional career as an artist, pursuing commissions from a rented New York studio. After two years, he returned to North Carolina and finally yielded to the calling of the ministry he had felt for so long.
Long was ordained as a minister in 1922, but he eventually decided that the more sedentary life of a pulpit minister was not for him. In 1925, he began his thirty-year career as an itinerant evangelist, preaching and conducting revivals in towns throughout the South and as far as Oklahoma and Maine. When Long retired from "walking the sawdust trail" in the late 1950s, about the age of seventy, he once again took up painting in earnest. Most of his subjects were religious, though he did occasionally paint portraits and landscapes.
There was one other subject that occupied his brush and pen for more than forty years, a mysterious figure known as the "Woman in Red," whom he painted more than seventy-five times over his career. Historians do not know whether she was an idealized version of his wife, an unrequited love from his youth, a secret mistress, or a figment of Long's imagination. Whoever she was, she was not only the subject of many paintings, but many of his poems and sonnets. She appears in "Flying Dreams," which could be Reverend Long's reflection upon his own life, on "the road not taken," or perhaps upon a specific, life-changing incident. It may represent Long's having to choose between his life as a preacher and married man, and life as an artist with the "Woman in Red" by his side.
Long spent much time, however, on more Biblical subjects. His most ambitious work is the Apocalyptic Scene with Philosophers and Historical Figures, which is set in Hell, depicting the fate of sinners described in Revelation as those who were "not found written in the book of lifeand were cast into the lake of fire." The painting should not be understood as a simple illustration, but as a summation of Long's personal antipathies to America's enemies and those who contributed to mankind's moral decline; above all, those whom some conservatives today label "secular humanists."
Four of the figures in the fiery lake can be readily identified. From left to right, they are: Mao Tse-Tung, visible just above a whip-toting demon; Benito Mussolini, with the Fascist emblem hovering above him; Josef Stalin, in the talons of a vulture, flanked by the Communist hammer and sickle; and Adolf Hitler, in the coils of a serpent, reaching out to grasp a swastika.
Others in the condemned group include Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Francis Bacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Voltaire, Baruch Spinoza, and Charles Darwin. Also there, are Thomas Henry Huxley, the principle exponent in England of Darwin's theory of evolution; and Albert Einstein, whose theories, like those of Darwin, challenged the Biblical account of Creation. Below Einstein, is Marlene Dietrich in a top hat and smoking a cigar. Standing on a rocky promontory above, are Reverend Long himself and Dante, classic Italian author of The Divine Comedy, who serves as Long's guide.
The heavenly counterpart to this hellish scene is Long's Parade of Christian Soldiers. In this painting, Christ stands on the balcony of an elaborate ecclesiastical structure, looking down on a group of figures that includes some apostles, John the Baptist and Moses. In the middle distance is a cavalcade that includes Samson (seated on a lion skin) and David, triumphantly holding aloft the head of Goliath. Immediately behind these figures is an array of more recent American heroes: Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee and Eddie Rickenbacker (holding the Christian flag), the famous World War I flying ace.
During the 1960s, Long's ambition was to illustrate the Book of Revelation, what he called "the most picturesque book in the Bible." Revelation was written during the brutal persecution of Christians during the first-century reign of Roman emperor Domitian. It is a vision of spiritual battle that comforted Christians of the era with its prediction of the final triumph of Christ and his followers.
Though Long was academically trained, his figures and compositions as a whole are relatively two-dimensional and eccentrically illustrational, verging on the 'cartoonie'. Anatomy and musculature are often exaggerated, sometimes seemingly intentionally deformed. Long's color has a high key, gaudy sweetness that also seems related to cartoons. But there is no question of his artistic integrity and spiritual sincerity, and his ability to organize the large, multi-figured compositions demanded by the Biblical text.
He illustrates the textual accounts from Revelation quite literally, but his paintings are also permeated with references from contemporary events. While these paintings are illustrations of scripture and part of a tradition that extends well back in the history of art, they are also intensely personal and imbued with a sense of urgency that takes them well beyond traditional representation.
In Long's The Fifth Angel Opens the Bottomless Pit (depicting events recorded in Rev. 9:1-11), an angel has opened up the bottomless pit of Hell, out of which emerges an infernal plague of hybrid locusts led by Apollyon, "the Destroyer." With great ferocity these scorpion-tailed beasts torment the unrepentant, those who do not bear "the seal of God," on earth as well as in the sky.
Although some figures are generic types, such as cosmonauts, there are a few figures among the tormented that can be identified. Directly under the angel, one of the beasts has stung Nikita Khrushchev, whom Long also portrayed in another apocalyptic painting from this time. Fidel Castro appears in the foreground, fleeing one of the beasts. Next to Castro is an equally dismayed golfer, whose presence in this infernal scene comes as something of a surprise.
Long's grandson, North Carolina fresco artist Ben Long, relates a story about this figure: "My grandfather disagreed with Eisenhower at some point and painted him in the sea of Hell with his golf clubs. My aunt told him, 'Eisenhower is still our President,' and my grandfather, who was very patriotic, felt a little ashamed about putting the President in Hell, so he put this little Dali mustache on him. That's the way he was. Whatever disagreed with him at the moment went into the picture."
In Christ Leads the Faithful into the Heavenly Paradise, Long's interpretation of the entry of the faithful doses not literally follow the description of the "new Heaven," "new earth," and "new Jerusalem" in Revelation 21 and 22. Instead, his vision is of an Arcadian paradise, replete with mountains, cascading waterfalls, blooming trees and flowers, a lake, and a fountain. The rainbow in the middle ground symbolizes God's benevolent presence.
The most remarkable aspect of the painting is Long's highly personal, auto biographical rendering of the faithful Christians being led by Christ into the Heavenly paradise. Several members of Long's family, including his mother, father, brothers and sisters, and children are included among the elect. At the head of the group, embracing and being embraced by Christ, is an elderly man. He cannot be readily identified with any known member of Long's family. Perhaps it is Reverend Long's portrayal of himself in old age, finally in the arms of his Savior, enjoying the eternal peace that his restless passion may have denied him in life.
Source:
David Steel, America Art Review, April 2003
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