It’s easy to think of the history of art as a timeline. One era or movement bleeds into the next. Disciples become masters, who grow their own workshops with new disciples who become masters. Art evolves as a response to the world but also, mostly, to itself. If you were painting in Holland in the middle of the 17th century, your work would, relative to the larger spectrum of art, look something like Rembrandt’s or Vermeer’s.

But of course it’s not always that straightforward. The history of art—with all of its broad themes, eras, and analyses—is a kind of lie, one we tell to simplify what is otherwise too complex. People born with immense talent don’t always choose to subscribe to the current styles (or, more commonly, they don’t have the resources or guidance to know what those are). In its reductive way, the world of art groups these artists together under the label “outsider,” though “naive,” “primitive,” or, more to the point, “self taught” can also be used. Sometimes artists choose such a style; Gauguin rubbed shoulders with many of the famous 20th century Impressionists, but instead paved the way for “Primitivism” to enter mainstream thought. This example shows how deceptive such terms can be. Ultimately, there’s no good way to group such a set of drastically different artists together. We can only try to learn about them individually, and in this way we can better understand what an “outsider” artist might look like. For that, let’s turn to an artist who had to overcome much more than just being an outsider: the injustices of segregation and war.

The span of Horace Pippin’s life—he was born just two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, and lived through World War II—is a reminder of just how recent slavery existed in the United States. It was a theme that permeated his work, but by no means was it the only one. Unlike artists who practiced from a young age, Pippin had the chance to live a full life before he took to the canvas. (In this way, his “outsider” status would prove to benefit his art.)

Pippin grew up between Pennsylvania and New York, where he attended (segregated) school until the age of 15, when he left to find work and support his family. He bounced between jobs in coal yards, hotels, and iron foundries, all while nurturing an apparent affinity (and genius) for art. (He would earn his first supplies—crayons and watercolors—by winning an art contest put on by a local art supply company.) When he went to fight in World War I (with the “Harlem Hellfighters,” a unit made up mostly of African Americans), he still made art; his illustrated journals depicting the war are the earliest trace of his work we have today. In a surprising (and horrific) way, the war would also indelibly shape the artist Pippin would become: when a sniper shot Pippin on the battlefield, he lost the use of his right arm.

When Pippin returned from the war, as the story goes, he turned to art in an effort to strengthen his arm (he often had to guide his right arm with his left). He used a poker to burn designs into wood panels and then painted within those outlines. Not surprisingly, he first used these images to protest war, including his first oil on canvas, The End of War: Starting Home (1931–1934).

By the end of the decade, he had fans in high places, among them the artist N.C. Wyeth, the critic Christian Brinton, and the collector Albert C. Barnes (the prominent founder of the Barnes Foundation). By this time Pippin had significantly expanded his subject matter, painting war and history, but also his childhood, biblical scenes, and everyday life. When, in 1938, he was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Masters of Popular Painting” exhibition, it was only a matter of time before art aficionados across the country knew his name.

From 1939 to 1940, just a few years before his death, he studied formally at the Barnes Foundation—though it’s hard to say what tangible effect this had on his style. In his own words, “The pictures which I have already painted come to me in my mind, and if to me it is a worthwhile picture, I paint it.”

Pippin’s life exemplifies how unhelpful the term “naive” can be. Whereas that word highlights what a certain artist lacks—formal training, friends in the art world—what we should be paying attention to is what set them apart, what gave them their singular style. In Pippin’s case, that can be one of many ingredients: his autodidactism, his witnessing of the horrors of the war, his disability and how he had to arrange his body to compensate, his work with wood panels, and his immersion in the black community (a subject that had often been left completely out of “mainstream” art). As the “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke put it, Pippin was “a real and rare genius, combining folk quality with artistic maturity so uniquely as almost to defy classification.”