Henry Ossawa Tanner

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The reputation of an important, unjustly neglected American artist is restored in this lavish catalogue of a touring exhibition assembled by Sewell, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Mosby, director of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University; and Alexander-Minter, of the New-York Historical Society. Son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, Henry Tanner (1859-1937) trained under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, then left his native U.S. in 1891 for Paris; a proud, quiet individualist determined to surmount racism, he would spent most of his life in France, serving as a beacon to the Harlem Renaissance. Tanner's sensitive, naturalistic animal studies, modernized reinterpretations of biblical themes, subdued yet powerful WW I scenes and brooding, mystical oriental pictures had an impact that was ``by no means race-bound''; his continual experimentation with techniques likewise influenced many artists. Tanner's marvelous visionary paintings of the late 1920s and early '30s are full of foreboding of a world on the brink of self-destruction. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Scion of a distinguished African American family, Tanner achieved international fame as a painter of genre and religious scenes in the first decades of this century only to lapse into obscurity in self-imposed exile in France. His resurrection and reappraisal, begun in the 1960s, will be greatly aided by this well-illustrated and scholarly catalog of the current nationally traveling retrospective. By virtue of its integration of biography and art criticism with 105 color and 94 black-and-white illustrations, this book is the preeminent work on Tanner. Recommended for art, academic, and public libraries.-- David McClelland, Temple Univ. Lib., Philadelphia