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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.
