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An American Artist: Henry Ossewa Tanner
| Article
# : |
19659 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,535 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
Henry Ossawa Tanner, the retrospective exhibition devoted to an artist who was both a student of Thomas Eakins, and perhaps the first truly important black artist, went on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this winter and is now touring the country. Unfortunately, it is the most regrettable disappointment of this season's round of exhibitions.
Sometimes exhibitions come along that one knows will be disasters, such as the Museum of Modern Art's misguided High and Low, on the relationship between modern art and popular culture. Perhaps because one's expectations for them are so low to begin with, one is not surprised when they turn out to be as dismal as one suspected they would be, and one feels no particular sense of loss.
This was not the case with the Tanner show, however. For many years--long before the current vogue for multiculturalism--Tanner has been known as an artist of considerable stature deserving the kind of comprehensive overview a retrospective and the attendant scholarship would provide. It goes without saying that he was far more deserving of this sort of attention than the many young, untested artists of the 1980s who were being given "midcareer surveys" with almost no track record.
Thus it was with considerable anticipation and a feeling of justice belatedly delivered that one greeted the announcement last year that the Philadelphia Museum of Art would be providing us with this long-overdue look at Tanner's career. More's the pity, then, that the exhibition failed to measure up to one's expectation. Tanner was a good artist, even a gifted one in the area of portraiture--the one mode of artistic activity that held little or no interest for him.
Academic Ideal
But although he was active at the turn of the century, at the very time when modern art was inventing itself, Tanner, hewing to the teachings of Thomas Eakins, remained faithful to the academic ideal of fidelity to nature in his paintings. There is nothing wrong in principle with refusing to heed the modernist call to arm. More to the point, Eakins was one of the greatest artists this country ever produced. Few could go wrong by heeding his example.
Tanner's failing was that he substituted one kind of academic realism for another. After moving to Paris in 1891 and studying at the Academie Julien in Paris, Tanner gradually substituted French for the American
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