My friend Valorie pulled me aside as I stood listening to a curator expounding on artist Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting “The Annunciation,” its brilliant light and shadows illuminating not only the painting itself but its message. She led me to an equally impressive painting a few feet away.
I have this print, she said, pointing to a small image of Tanner’s “The Banjo Lesson.” The museum had used it in an exhibition note alongside Tanner’s oil painting “Christ Learning to Read” that also focused on the theme of teaching.
I was familiar with the banjo image, because reproductions of it have been bought by tons of African Americans wanting their own replica of this master’s works that represented them. “The Banjo Lesson (1893)” and “The Thankful Poor (1894)” are among Tanner’s most recognizable works. Tanner saw them both as representing positive and non-stereotypical images of black people, according to the auction catalog.
But you won’t find either of them at this exhibit (“Banjo” is owned by Hampton University and “Poor” by Bill and Camille Cosby). That’s probably a good thing because they could easily distract you from all the other wonderful works produced by Tanner and cause you to miss the breadth of his talent. The exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts covered five rooms, and each focused on a different stage of his life, his travels and his sensibilities.
This exhibit is not one to be missed. Called “Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit,” it is a collection of 100 paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures, most of which were completed when he lived in France for 46 years. The works will be exhibited at the academy in Philadelphia until April 15, 2012, and are then headed to Cincinnati and Houston. A companion exhibit of works by African American artists inspired by Tanner was also on display.
You can’t have a Tanner exhibit without his religious paintings – “The Annunciation,” “Christ Learning to Read,” with his wife and son as models. Or the first-time-shown-in-the-United States “The Resurrection of Lazarus.” He painted that oil on canvas in 1897, and it traveled here from its home at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris.
PAFA has a familial tie to Tanner, who studied at the school from 1879 to 1885 and was its first African American student. He developed a fond relationship with his teacher Thomas Eakins, a renowned American artist who himself had gone through the academy. Tanner spent most of his years in Paris – he sailed for Europe in 1891 – to escape the indignities of being black in America.
On the wall in one of the rooms were his comments from 1908 regarding the freedom of living abroad:
“In Paris … no one regards me curiously, I am simply ‘M. Tanner, an American artist.’ Nobody knows or cares what was the complexion of my forbears. I live and work there on terms of absolute social equality.”
It was a sentiment shared by many other African American expatriate artists, writers and musicians who found refuge in a country that accepted them for their talents absent of their skin color. According to the auction catalog, some of the artists – including Aaron Douglas (who as a child was inspired to paint after seeing a reproduction of a Tanner work in a magazine), Palmer Hayden and Hale Woodruff – visited Tanner in his studio in France.
The exhibit brought me face to face with a Tanner I was unfamiliar with. I knew nothing about his time spent in my native South. He moved to Atlanta in 1889 and opened a photo studio that apparently didn’t do too well, according to notes at the exhibition.
He must have loved the land he saw, though, because he captured on canvas the misty mountains of Highlands, NC, and an uneven road through a scraggly countryside in my home state in a painting titled “Georgia Landscape (1889-90).” About a half-dozen of the works in the exhibit were painted while he was there.
He showed an affinity for plain people in his paintings of the French countryside and its people – done about five years after his adventure South. Those images were so big and so bold that I felt like I was in the room with the cobbler and his son in “The Young Sabot Maker (1895)” and sitting in an oversized boat with fishermen hauling in their nets at sea in “The Miraculous Haul of Fishes (1913-14).”
Even Tanner the photographer was new to me (he used photographs to create some of his paintings), and it was a side of him I was happy to meet in an exhibit that was not overwhelming, large-scale or endless. The exhibit rounded him out a man and an artist, bringing me closer to who he was and what he tried to achieve at a time when it wasn’t easy for him.
In her talk about the works, the curator noted that one painting by Tanner – “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” – was still out there somewhere missing. A reproduction photo of it hung in a shadowy space in the second room of the exhibit.
My friend Kristin directed me to the painting and suggested that I be on the lookout for it, wishfully thinking that it might turn up at auction. The painting was exhibited at PAFA in 1896, toured nationally and internationally and at some point was lost, according to the exhibition catalog. There are photographs of it, and a later work on paper in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
I don’t expect to find it hidden behind some awful-looking painting at any of my auctions. But I might have a better chance of coming across a January 1903 copy of the Ladies Home Journal magazine with reproductions of paintings by Tanner called “The Mothers of the Bible: A Series of Four Great Biblical Paintings.” I will definitely keep my eyes open for a copy of it.
The exhibit also included a children’s book about Tanner, written and illustrated by artist Faith Ringgold. I got a copy and will add it to my collection of children’s books illustrated by artists.
