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A painter who defies labels

Henry O. Tanner at Pennsylvania Academy (3rd review)

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'Fishermen at Sea' (1913): Uncanny spirituality.
'Fishermen at Sea' (1913): Uncanny spirituality.
Since several of my BSR colleagues have weighed in on the (long overdue) Henry Ossawa Turner exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy, I thought to stay my pen on this subject. Still, a few things remain unsaid about this distinctive and thoroughly independent artist.

Tanner was a black artist painting genre scenes about mostly "white" subjects— I put up the quotes because, although Biblical Jews were, so to speak, honorary and largely Aryan Christians to 19th-Century taste, Jews contemporaneous with Tanner himself were (like other Near Eastern types of the Orientalist period) racial exotics at best.

Of course, it's a modern question to ask why (or whether) Tanner had some kind of problem devoting his career to painting people of a different color. It's a little like asking why Jackie Robinson played baseball with all-white teams against all-white opponents. You deal with what's there; and, after Tanner moved to France, that's mostly what was.

Still, Tanner could have painted landscapes (he did), or, with the coming of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, canvases of planes and color fields (he didn't). He certainly loosened his brushwork, and in much of his later work the human form is reduced and at times indistinct.

Man of faith

But he never gave up the figure, and, although he painted the fisher folk of Étaples pursuing about their occupation, he continued to depict Biblical scenes long after they had gone (but for Rouault) almost wholly out of fashion in fine art. One must assume the obvious: Tanner was a man of faith.

How valid, then, are the Biblical scenes on which Tanner's contemporary reputation largely rested, and by which he is likely to be judged— I mean, to what extent does he add a dimension to some of the most well-worked themes of Western art?

The Raising of Lazarus, painted in Paris and never before exhibited in the U.S., won first prize at the 1897 Salon of Paris and established Tanner's French career. It is large and carefully worked, but not distinguished. The hand of Lazarus, resting on the edge of his coffin, is expressive, but his face is still in the first stages of waking.

Jesus, tall and robed, looks on impassively, and the scene's emotions register in the faces of the onlookers, who express varying states of astonishment. It is there that the challenge of the picture lies; but, although each face is individually portrayed, the effect is mostly pop-eyed or open-mouthed.

Mother of God, yes, but….

The Annunciation, Tanner's other best-known work, is rather more successful. The angel is represented as a pillar of light, while Mary shies away in a corner. She is thoroughly human in this moment, submissive but fearful, a girl about to be swept into womanhood in a clearly unorthodox fashion. It is far from a great work, but the psychology is carefully considered and touchingly expressed.

Mary was to remain a prime focus for Tanner, and his depictions of her— from the young mother watching over her infant to the mature woman returning from the scene of the Cross— are infused with a pensive fatalism that declares a truth never to be spoken: that being the Mother of God is never quite compensation for the loss of a child.

In the very last image, as Mary goes on her final way, her face records not sorrow but (along with the sense of a destiny fulfilled) a kind of knowing relief: Jesus isn't the only one who reflects, "It is finished."

This subtlety and complexity reveals Tanner at his best, and one cannot help but think of the equally pensive early portraits of his own mother, who raised a sickly child who would by virtue of his skin alone be exposed to more than his share of the world's abuse. Perhaps, indeed, the "color question" in Tanner is best resolved in these coded representations— and, too, in his occasional but assertive depictions of black males, such as the portrait of Booker T. Washington.

Uncanny moon

For me, though, the chief interest in Tanner lies in his fascination with the color blue, and the crepuscular landscapes he favored. Particularly fine is the moonlit sky in Christ and His Disciples on Their Way to Bethany (1902-03), which engulfs the wayfarers but seems to cast its light as well beyond the frame at the viewer.

Fishermen at Sea (1913) works a similar magic, with a dark sea for its subject rather than a night sky, the moon's reflection here embedded in its waters. There's nothing overtly supernatural in this latter scene, and yet a sense of the uncanny— call it the spiritual if you will— inheres in it. One is reminded a little of the Maine seascapes of Marsden Hartley, different though the two painters are in style and sensibility.

Tanner gets more interesting for me as he gets older and his coloring gets more layered, textured and experimental.

His two representations of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, both from the 1920s, figure the calamity as an unfurling cloud of thick smoke rising above a bare landscape, all but closing the sky. To depict the event simply in terms of smoke and earth— it could well be simply a natural eruption— suggests both the immediacy and remoteness of divine wrath.

His own testament

A late depiction of a favored subject, the Good Shepherd, shows a lone figure leading his barely discernible flock to the edge of a giant crevasse identified as belonging to the Atlas Mountains: certainly a long way from the Holy Land, but a striking image of faith in adversity. One feels Tanner painting far more from the inside out in these works, weaving a personal signature into Biblical references that serve more as psychological markers than anything else. Genre painting has been left far behind: this is a man making his own testament.

Tanner doesn't fit easily into any categories, and he may always stand at a slight distance from conventional art history. It is almost obligatory to praise him, and thus easy to make excessive claims on his behalf. But there's that wonderful palette of blues, and the quiet penetration of his best faces.

Do we need to assign him a place? He occupies a niche of his own. ♦


To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.


What, When, Where

“Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit.†Through April 15, 2012 at Hamilton Hall, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 128 N. Broad St. (at Cherry). (215) 972-7625 or www.pafa.org.

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