North Carolina's Reverend Long (1888-1976) is better known for being the grandfather of a famous contemporary artist, fresco painter Ben Long, than he is for the many, many paintings he made himself. The remarkable exhibition Picture Painter of the Apocalypse, currently on view at Davidson College, co-curated by Brad Thomas, Director of Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College, and David Steel, Curator of European Art at North Carolina Museum of Art, will undoubtedly change this obscurity.
In this exhibit, 30 of these narrative paintings surround the viewer in three rooms, battering your consciousness no matter where you stand, sit or move. In one room alone, more than a dozen works, illustrating apocalyptic tales from The Bible, encircle the viewer with incredible imagery and have a visual impact that the artist himself probably never had the opportunity to see -- great groups of his painted visions hanging side-by-side in well-lit spaces.
With the exception of a couple of finely painted portraits in the exhibition, all the other paintings are evangelical, and narrative in subject matter. Long's main preoccupation in these later works is with the Book of Revelation, written in about A.D. 95 on the island of Patmos, off the coast of Asia Minor, by an exile named John, who may or may not have been the same person as Saint John of the Gospels. The author penned this polemic in the wake of persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor Domitian.
While many of Long's painterly passages offer literal interpretations of Biblical passages, he also idiosyncratically highlights secular individuals -- politicos of his time, and luminaries from history -- and whether Long perceived these apparitions to be good, bad or merely noteworthy is often ambiguous. Appearing among these characters from the first half of the 20th century is a constellation of wacky, wicked-seeming females -- cookie-cutter, paper-doll Jezebels with "painted" faces. In good Baptist tradition, if a woman in a Long painting is not the Virgin or a Saint, she's likely perceived as one of these flashy strumpets.
It's odd to see these anonymous bikini-garbed women, some of them surely inspired by living actresses of the time, with figures modeled after Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe, collaged together with saints and assorted divine beings. In other instances, carefully copied renderings of men living in Long's lifetime people the canvases. Hitler, Mussolini and Eisenhower line up alongside Romans emperors, with appearances by the Renaissance poet Dante and miscellaneous saints. The star of each show is usually Long's rendering of the YMCA-style, Caucasian Jesus.
The inclusion of "Life Magazine realism," resulting in explicit renderings of "real" people, gives Long's art a certain documentary cast, yet these faces appear "stuck-on," as if garnered from a sticker book. The juxtaposition makes this later work appear anachronistic and kitsch, surreal and oddly creepy, all at the same time. Stylistically, the man was detail-crazy, rendering each petal -- leaf -- or hair -- exactingly. But he wasn't always such an obsessive painter.
Long was about 27 when he painted a traditional portrait of his father in the exhibition (circa 1915), and it's a far sight from the stylized pictures he made 50 years later, which have a cruder look. What happened to Long's artistic talent so evident in his early years is anyone's guess. Why the clumsy renderings when we know the man obviously "could paint," and why the flattened, pre-Renaissance perspective, when painting crowds or posses of believers in Christ Leads the Faithful Into Heavenly Paradise (circa 1960-65)? Did the painter with a vision paint too fast, hurrying desperately to "get it down" before the vision left his perception?
Did the speedy technique become slapdash, forcing the artist to over-paint to render more sharply the details of faces, truncated to a model-maker's scale? Or did his technique suffer because of declining senses of sight, of touch? Co-curator Brad Thomas cites some family anecdotes that suggest that this latter was the case.
The change in Long's oeuvre is puzzling, for his was no gradual evolution; it was more of a huge jump. During the years he was preaching full-time, he gave voice to his growing convictions about imminent doom without repentance -- the fall of man -- through sermons and hymns. His output was prodigious, and after retiring from his fire and brimstone pulpit, Long painted these visions, on canvas, on Masonite, on board. John's cataclysmic writings find their horrific illustrations of rivers of blood, hail and fire mixed with blood falling from the sky, and Jesus sitting on a cloud with a blood-drenched sickle while blood floods the countryside. Many of these depictions are taken literally from John's text, although by his own admission, Long's experience as an ambulance driver in the bloody trenches of WWI also affected him deeply.
McKendree Long was born in 1888, when Vincent Van Gogh was already painting in a field of sunflowers in Southern France, and Victorian mores still colored every element of life. But when change came, in the form of war, it was sudden and harsh, shattering the sturdy placid Victorian sureness of life. Long, already a father and too old to be drafted, enlisted anyway and went to France to drive an ambulance on the front. (Hemingway, 10 years younger, did the same thing on the Italian front.)
While this experience of unprecedented horrors changed men of all persuasions, neither the trench nor the battlefield became a literal canvas in the painter's later work. Long's depiction of gore is another sort: transcendent. For some zealots, horror can be sublime.
By the time Long painted the lurid pool of blood in The Woman Arrayed in Purple and Scarlet and the Two Beasts (oil on Masonite), the man had most likely internalized his memories of France. Yet this picture, with St. Peter's in the background, set oddly close on the bank of a brilliantly colored River Tiber, painted in Day-Glo orange reflecting the sky that could echo the flashes of the guns of August, is also oddly reminiscent of the festive colors of the Catholic art of Mexico.
Long also bears witness to later apocalyptic events. Charles Reagan Wilson describes Long's Apocalyptic Scene with Philosophers and Historical Figures, circa 1959 (oil on board, 48" x 72"): "...he depicts Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini in the lake of fire and brimstone, while Descartes, Darwin, and Einstein observe. Few images could better represent the terrors, and perhaps some hopes, of the twentieth century that Long had lived through."
Being unsettled by scientific discoveries, as well as mid-twentieth century philosophy and other things, explains some of Long's subject matter. But why did his style become so frontal, so illustrative, yet stagy? Stylistically, Long often creates an "all-over" pattern on the picture plane, using landscape elements and cityscapes to fill larger areas, as in The Parade of Christian Soldiers, and he often crowds the foregrounds of his paintings with people, some seeming to be added on top of existing pictures, at later dates. Some of these paintings were made over several years, sometimes as long as 5 to 13 years. In The Parade..., with its articulated architecture complete with rose window, the drawing itself has become quite rigid; the knights on horseback (among them Abe Lincoln and Davy Crockett) look more like molded plastic or dye-cast metal figures than the rendition of something living. The horses, frozen in motion, are more toy-like than like real, moving animals.
The content is unrepentingly militaristic in The Parade..., presenting a young King David on horseback holding high the head of Goliath. Milling around him, the crazed and beaming faces of the conquerors are as beatific as the faces of the Stepford wives. In this "happy" picture, peoples' expressions are quite giddy, implying they're ecstatic to be "the chosen ones."
When Long is painting crowds like these, he forms them into patterns -- blocks of soldiers or knights, crowds of converts. And in some pictures, like Andy Warhol, Long portrays the famous and the infamous of the day -- with living dictators and dead poets side-by-side with his own self-portrait and his own private Jezebel, the mysterious "The Woman in Red."
As entertaining as it is to study these images, it's hard to take Long's less well-painted work as seriously as art by a great religious painter such as Piero della Francesca. Piero's great frescoes, so influential in the work of grandson Ben Long, manage all this intensity and drama with masterful technique.
Even though painted by a man who was a preacher, Long's work is secular in tone, and while he emphasizes Christianity's darker side, his content reeks of the Sunday comics and "Gothic" imagery. The motifs, smiling wild beasts, angels with big, strong wings, busty dames, lots of dragons, lots of blood-red paint, lyres, doves and graffiti-style renderings of the hammer-and-sickle and the swastika, are appliqued in a manner more suited to a modern, gore-drenched video game.
Long often depicts saints by outlining their entire forms in thin halos of white, as in The Good Shepherd (1960-65), which actually lends a velvet painting quality to this piece, and to Wrongside Fishing under Man -- Resultless (1964, on Masonite). Fans of Thomas Kincaid will love this one.
There's a mind-boggling amount to see in each and every painting. Viewing a collection this size takes several hours. Brad Thomas and David Steel have generated an exciting exhibition, with an artist not easily categorized. Long is someone who, in Thomas' words, has "fallen through the cracks."
Anyone with even the glimmer of an interest in contemporary Southern culture and history should see this exhibit in the flesh, see the pores of the paintings to understand, and be grabbed by them. The lush catalogue is also worthy of study.
But this work goes beyond a "southern" take on life. The visionary zeal shown here is every bit as intense, and frightening, as what we perceive as Muslim fervor. It's a worrying illustration of the fanatical violence at the heart of fundamentalist religion. Yes, Reverend McKendree Robbins Long: Picture Painter of the Apocalypse is pretty extreme. But then, the concept of eternal damnation is pretty darned extreme, too.
The Revelation is the good reverend's vision of what's to come: lots of blood, a falling, blitzed city, bottomless pits of fire, and death, death and torment everywhere. The consistent iconography of Long's oeuvre is one of the compelling aspects of this idiosyncratic portrayal of Christianity's dark side. This painter who turned his back on classical technique and the modernist movement was no "outsider" artist, and I personally discard this appellation. More likely, this visionary artist will be remembered much as his catalogue raisonee presents him -- as an obsessed personality who had to get out the word, to share the intensity of his beliefs.
If you make only one art gallery visit the remainder of the winter, see this visionary painter, poet, preacher and Davidson College alumnus from Statesville.
Reverend McKendree Robbins Long: Picture Painter of the Apocalypse is currently on view through March 1 at Van Every and Smith Galleries at Davidson College. Gallery hours are 10am-5pm weekdays and 12noon-4pm on weekends. For more information, call 704-894-2519.
