![Henry Ossawa Tanner [Exhibition Catalogue, 1991/92]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Ai8HgUhEL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
This is the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition of the same name organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which was shown there from January to April 2012 and then traveled to the Cincinnati Art Museum (May to September) and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (October 2012 to January 2013). Although some small individual shows of the works of Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937) have been presented before, he has usually been exhibited as one of the artists in a larger group, as, for example, in the great 2006 "Americans in Paris" show in London, Boston and New York. That is perhaps because, having gone to Paris in 1891, he remained in France for the rest of his life and returned only occasionally, and always briefly, to his native country. He was an expatriate in the truest sense of the word, and during his lifetime he was far better known in Europe than here. It is very good, then--even if it has taken seventy-five years since his death--that the PAFA has mounted this first substantial solo exhibition and published its 308-page catalogue, which is the first comprehensive book on Tanner's work and the largest collection of his oeuvre currently available.
And it's quite a good book. There are 106 full-color plates, mostly full-page, spanning the almost sixty years of his active career and including such iconic works as "The Banjo Lesson" (1893), an African-American genre painting for which he is probably best known in the US, and "The Resurrection of Lazarus" (1896), acquired by the French government for the collection of the Luxembourg Museum in a kind of official recognition of his work that was an important milestone in his creative development. I did not see the exhibition and have not seen enough of Tanner's paintings in the original to judge whether the reproductions are true to color, which would be a particularly important point for him; the essayists in the volume frequently mention the very subtle color effects he achieved in the many nocturnal and low-light scenes he painted. The reproductions feature a wide range of blues from lapis and aquamarine to cerulean and cyans; none seem either washed out or excessive, but all I can say for sure is that they are sharp and seem natural. There are also ninety or so companion illustrations, also mostly in color. Twelve essays by various hands, including those of the scholar and painter David Driskell, put Tanner and his work into a very wide context, ranging from a discussion of his painting styles to his prominent role in the American expatriate community in France, family life at his residence in Brittany and his resistance to being drawn into issues of racial conflict in America (even though he quite consciously left the US in order to escape its endemic racism and its efforts to pigeon-hole him as a "Negro artist"--in France he was known simply as a prominent "American artist"). The breadth of these essays provides an excellent introduction to his life and work. There is a 16-page chronology of his life and career, liberally illustrated with photographs of him and his family and friends, as well as a selected bibliography and comprehensive index. For me there is a bit too much emphasis on the biographical and social at the expense of the aesthetic to warrant an enthusiastic five-star rating, but the book is unquestionably a very valuable contribution to our understanding of American art in the first half of the last century, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone interested in that area.
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