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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!"
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