McKendree Robbins Long at Luise Ross

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Michael Amy

Reverend McKendree Robbins Long's life (1888-1976) began and ended in Statesville, N.C. The son of a North Carolina Supreme Court justice, he spent three years at the Art Students League in New York before winning an award in 1911 to study for two years in Europe. During that time he lived mostly in London, where he had his first spiritual calling. His service as an ambulance driver in France during World War I marked him deeply, and in 1922, back in the U.S., he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Three years later, he became an itinerant preacher intent upon spreading the Word throughout the South, and in 1935 he joined the Baptist fold. Although he never gave up painting, following his retirement in the late 1950s, he found more time to pursue it.

This exhibition, Long's first in New York, consisted of two groups of paintings, both figurative and allegorical in nature. The earlier ones, of the 1940s, express his longing for a voluptuous brunette whose identity and status remain unknown. In Gloaming Glimmers (oil on board, ca. 1946), the woman, wearing a tight-fitting striped dress, is shown half-length, facing left, in front of a lush landscape at sundown. While her monumental, Rubenesque figure fills more than half of the composition, her arms are dramatically cropped by the bottom and right edges of the canvas. Her left hand is raised toward her ample bosom, which is echoed in the groups of flowers on the left and emphasized by the vibrant verticals running down her low-cut bodice. Long aimed to rival the eloquence of old-master painting, yet his style is loaded, too, with the communicative qualities we find in illustration, hand-painted signs and pictures produced for advertising retail.

The second and larger group of pictures dates from the 1960s and depicts scenes inspired by the Book of Revelation. Long's garish palette, awkward figure style (his mastery of human anatomy was shaky, to put it mildly), unctuous brushstrokes, jumps in scale and distortions of space are well suited to render the hallucinatory visions of John. In The Damned Are Cast into the Lake of Fire and Brimstone (oil on canvas, 1968), Christ is shown seated upon his throne in three-quarter profile facing left; members of his heavenly court appear behind him. These figures, along with some gigantic insects in the foreground, look toward a boiling lake in which men and women twist in pain and horror as they are being consumed by the fire and eaten alive by monsters. Long was an archconservative who saw the world in terms of good and evil. His best pictures are those that effectively convey his fervor.

--Michael Amy