Modern Spirit

Appearing more than two decades after the Philadelphia Museum of Art's foundational survey of the career of one of the city's native sons,¹ Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit is a welcome re-visit to this understudied artist's professional achievement. Because the current exhibition in the Samuel V. Hamilton Building of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) assumes a similar retrospective model, a good number of Tanner's works re-appear, not surprisingly, here. But during this twenty-one year interval, a number of additional works have been located, and intellectual inquiry around Tanner's career has ripened, attracting an assembly of fresh voices and varied perspectives to the conversation. As a result, Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, along with its accompanying catalog, stands as a substantial academic accomplishment, the product of many assiduous minds.

Unwilling to contextualize Tanner in sweeping categories defined by race, biography, or chronology, the PAFA exhibition includes elements of each of these usual suspects, but greatly expands and complicates the discussion to cast Tanner as a leader in an international community of artists, and as a much more versatile figure than the traditional art historical narrative has led us to believe. To enhance our understanding of Tanner as a cosmopolitan figure, the galleries are organized according to "place," each gallery corresponding to the different geographies of Tanner's career. Central to this narrative are Tanner's famous travels to Paris, North Africa, and the Holy Land; accordingly, works from, related to, or inspired by these trips appear in the most privileged of gallery spaces, to which visitors are led as part of a carefully choreographed experience. Lest we forget Tanner's influential experiences in the Middle East, Moorish arches draped with scrims covered in Orientalizing motifs transform gallery passageways to remind us of Tanner's international career. These designs repeat the interior of Frank Furness's historic 1876 PAFA building next door, cleverly linking the global and the local. And so the exhibition begins with a look at Tanner's local experiences in Philadelphia, where he got his start as an artist, and more specifically at PAFA, where his artistic training would prove formative.

Fig. 1.

Bust of Benjamin Tucker Tanner, 1894. Patinated plaster, 15 × 12 ½ × 9 ½ in. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland Museum purchase with funds provided by the Eddie and Sylvia Brown Challenge Grant for the Acquisition of African American art and the estate of Anna Fehl, 2004.

Photo © The Walters Art Museum.

In an introductory gallery filled with academic figure drawings and animal paintings relevant to his training at PAFA, as well as portraits of family members at home, the visitor is enticed by Tanner's well known Portrait of the Artist's Mother (1897), with and its often drawn association with the even better known Whistler's Mother, and by the portrait of Tanner painted by his mentor and much heroicized Philadelphia icon, Thomas Eakins. The most interesting work in this gallery, however, is the portrait bust of the artist's father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner (fig. 1). Poised just at the entrance to the exhibition, Benjamin Tanner's bust, and just behind it, a large patinated plaster relief of Richard and Sarah Allen created to honor the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, introduce Tanner's work as a sculptor, a direction that has been regrettably overlooked in scholarship, but which should now be propelled by its inclusion in this exhibition.

Fig. 2.

Angels Appearing before the Shepherds, c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 25 ¾ × 31 7/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum...