Going to Hell

The command “go to hell” has a fine literary and artistic pedigree. Exiled on Patmos, Saint John the Evangelist dreamed of the second coming of Christ and the suffering that the end time would bring for disbelievers. “In order that the bliss of the saints may be more delightful,” wrote Aquinas, “it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the damned.” Gregory the Great, Roger Bacon, Langland, Dante, and Milton all took up the theme. In the visual arts, a handful of names—Michelangelo, Signorelli, Dürer, Blake, Jim Dine—suffice to indicate the diversity of figures who have found a fertile subject in the suffering of the wicked.

After last fall’s terrorist attack, the satiric newspaper The Onion printed an article titled “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell.” “I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise,” says a Qaeda terrorist, “but instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit.” Ha ha, we chuckle, half believing the article, half repulsed by our own instinctive acceptance of the image.

The paintings of the Reverend McKendree Robbins Long, the subject of a new exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art, are similarly grotesque, comic, and ultimately disturbing. Long, an itinerant Baptist preacher and evangelist by trade, made large, complicated paintings that show John’s Apocalypse, the rewards for Christians in heaven, and the pains of hell. Long’s subjects range from God on His Throne Holding the Book of Seals and The Good Shepherd to Like the Torture of a Scorpion and Death Rides a Pale Horse; his paintings feature an odd cast of politicians, celebrities, skeletons, angels, glowing Christians, and benighted disbelievers. Jesus and Satan regularly appear.

Long’s apocalyptic scenes—cartoonish and awkward—bear all the marks of the self-trained “outsider” artist. In many of his works, the sense of perspective does not hold, objects are out of proportion, and characters seem to break through the front of the picture plane. But appearances can deceive. Though he spent his adult life preaching and evangelizing, Long was not a newcomer to art when he made his paintings of the Apocalypse. The son of a prominent North Carolina judge, he studied art at Davidson College, an élite Presbyterian school in North Carolina. Later, he took classes at the Art Students League in New York and studied under the Hungarian portraitist Sir Philip de László in London. The paintings Long made as a young man demonstrate competent, if by no means extraordinary, technical skill.

At the age of 31, however, Long gave up painting in order to become an evangelist. He was well suited for his calling. Recordings of Long’s sermons attest to his skill as a preacher. An early handbill announces “HEAR REV. MCK. R. LONG. HE HAS A REAL MESSAGE.” The Robesonian, the daily paper of Lumberton, North Carolina, reports the conversion of 675 persons during one of Long’s revivals. Only in the early 1950s, after a long career in ministry, did Long return to painting in earnest. When he did, he did not put the hellfire and brimstone that his career was hitherto predicated on behind him.

In the diptych Master and Servants of the Hereafter two scenes—one of heaven, the other of hell—are set side by side in a stained green wood frame. In hell, a man sits naked, one leg painfully splayed to the side, a plume of smoke rising toward his crotch. Behind him, a purple demon holds a long sword menacingly above his penis. Another demon—imagine a cross between Plutus, guarding the fourth circle of Dante’s Inferno, and John Goodman’s character in Monsters, Inc.—pours molten liquid onto his head. Around the condemned man, serpents and dragons gleefully lick hell’s flames. At the bottom of the picture, a caption in saracenic type reads “The rejecter in hell, with demons his masters Forever!”

Next door in heaven, a blond Christian reclines on a comfortable bed framed by lavender curtains, a golden arch behind him giving way to forests and white mountains. In his hand, he holds a cup of wine as large as his head. Three large angels attend him; one harps, another other massages his feet, while the third sits beneath his left arm reading, girlish fingers covering her cheek. “The Christian in Heaven,” the caption reads, “with his angels his helpers FOREVER!”

Master and Servants is mild by Long’s standards. Its hell is nasty but not sickening, its heaven alluring but bland. In contrast, Long’s apocalyptic landscapes are more carefully rendered, complex, and awesome. Apocalyptic Scene with Philosophers and Historical Figures (shown above) is a fearsome, six-foot-wide painting. In it, a Who’s Who of Western philosophers, scientists, and politicians are deployed, Sergeant Pepper style, alongside a lake where Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini burn. Freud, Pascal, and Einstein wait for a glowing skeleton to send them to the flames. Darwin and Scopes’ monkey wait with Huxley. The demon from Master and Servants eyes Marx. Nietzsche, oblivious to the ressentiment all about him, stands flanked by Francis Bacon and Voltaire.

Above the lake of fire, small, naked figures fall head over heels to hell from earth. In the background, an immeasurably distant cross flanked by angels shines through dark clouds. Further up, two ratty demons burn a scroll labeled “The Bull of the Philosophers.” The Rev. Long, accompanied by Dante, watches the scene below.

Long’s other apocalyptic landscapes are just as blunt and political. Following Dürer, Long produced a series of paintings depicting the seven angels of the Apocalypse. In Long’s version of the first angel, a Christmas tree ornament angel blows a tiny horn, and the sky opens up onto a quaint Lake Wobegon scene, complete with bald eagles and a fishing dingy, from which an unsuspecting fishermen jumps in fear. In The Two Witnesses, an Apollonian angel blows a gush of fire onto a gang of mustachioed German soldiers. Hovering in the background, two little angels look on, content at the soldiers’ (and their German shepherds’) suffering.

Long’s lurid imagination and outrageous lack of tact help to explain—to some extent—his paintings’ popularity in the salons of well-heeled Tarheels and Fifth Avenue sophisticates. By the familiar alchemy of outsider art, attitudes that would be deplored in more mundane settings are praised for their “authenticity.”1

What cannot be explained by appeal to Long’s authenticity is explained by his being a Southerner. One reviewer approvingly quotes Flannery O’Connor, suggesting that her artistic program was somehow analogous to Long’s, as if there were a secret fount of inspiration all Southerners share:

Perhaps Long’s vision was summed up in the observations of the Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, who wrote, “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural. … To the hard of hearing you shout and to the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”2

Ignore, for the sake of charity, the vast difference in style between Long’s apocalyptic landscapes and O’Connor’s perfectly formed neorealism. Is there any doubt that some of the subjects Long portrays (Nazis, for example) are universally recognized as repugnant? By the standard O’Connor sets, painting Hitler in the pits of hell is somewhat redundant. As for Long’s other subjects (Einstein, for example), it is wrong to say that Long makes them “appear as distortions.” For Long, unlike O’Connor, does not transform. To transform requires effort, patience, and a willingness to understand the very thing the artist finds repugnant. Instead, Long damns.

Patrons of the arts for whom the Last Judgment is a long-discarded superstition can maintain a comfortable detachment from Long’s apocalyptic visions. But what of those who still wrestle with its import? At the end of the great medieval dream vision Pearl, the poem’s narrator becomes so obsessed with reaching the kingdom of God that he attempts the impossible. Feverishly mad, he tries to cross the river that separates this mortal world from the next:

Moved by delight of sight and sound,
My maddened mind all fate defied.
I would follow her there, my newly found,
Beyond the river though she must bide.3

The dreamer’s fate is unhappy: he sinks in the river and wakes from his dream, mournfully wishing he had “sought to content my Lord / And taken his gifts without regret.”

Pearl, I think, is a useful antidote to the Reverend McKendree Robbins Long, picture painter of the Apocalypse. Like Pearl‘s dreamer, Long yearns for that thing he cannot have. When he gives expression to his frenzied, childlike beliefs, it becomes clear how dangerously näive his conception of the world is. Judgment is not his—nor, in spite of the all too imperfect state of the world, is there apocalypse now.

—”Reverend McKendree Robbins Long: Picture Painter of the Apocalypse” opened at the North Carolina Museum of Art, April 7-August 25, 2002. The exhibition travels to the Hickory Museum of Art in Hickory, North Carolina, December 14, 2002-March 9, 2003.

David Noll is a partner at Public Digital, a design firm in New York.

See, for example, Stephen Kinzer, “Painterly Sermons Mix Severe and Sensual,” The New York Times, July 1, 2002; and R. Wilson and D. Steel, McKendree Robbins Long: Picture Painter of the Apocalypse (North Carolina Museum of Art, 2002), published in conjunction with the exhibition.
“To the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,” Davidson College Journal, Winter 2001. Reprinted as “The Vivid, Startling Canvases of McKendree Long,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 25, 2002. For O’Connor’s full essay, see The Fiction Writer and His Country in O’Connor’s Collected Works (Library of America, 1988).
Pearl: A New Verse Translation by Marie Borroff (Norton, 1977).