Christ appears as a blurry form in Tanner’s “The Disciples See Christ Walking on the Water.”
IMAGES COURTESY OF THE DES MOINES ART CENTER
Artist’s stature rises over century
by MICHAEL MORAIN • mmorain@dmreg.com
Over the years, the Des Moines Art Center’s acquisition committee has had a pretty good track record of buying work by artists on their way up. Some artists’ stars rise quickly, while others take years to be recognized beyond the relatively tight orbit of the art world.
In the case of Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose shimmering dream-like landscapes and religious paintings are part of a small show that went up Friday just off the main gallery, his fame is still expanding almost 90 years after the Art Center scooped up the first of four of his works in its collection. One of the museum’s founders, a local bridge builder named J.S. “Sanny” Carpenter, spotted Tanner’s talent in the 1910s – decades before scholars recognized him as one of the 19th century’s best African-American artists, whose work belongs next to more famous (white) contemporaries such as James Whistler and John Singer Sargent.
“Tanner’s an artist whose stature has continued to grow over time because of the quality of the work,” said the Art Center’s Laura Burkhalter, who curated the show. “It’s really amazing that we have four of his pieces.”
Those four – plus a Tanner portrait of Booker T. Washington that the Iowa Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs commissioned for what is now the State Historical Society of Iowa – anchor the new exhibition, which was prompted in part by an upcoming retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Tanner was the first black student to attend. After the Des Moines show closes at the end of February, the five Iowa paintings will be sent to Philadelphia before they travel to museums in Atlanta and Houston.
“It was the perfect time to highlight them before they’re seen by the whole country,” Burkhalter said.
Born to an African Methodist Episcopal bishop in 1859, Tanner spent his early years on the East Coast. He struggled as an artist until his early 30s, when he sold enough paintings to move to Paris, where racial discrimination wasn’t as widespread. (The American painter Mary Cassatt, whose work is displayed with that of Auguste Rodin and Paul Gaugin in the new show, moved to France around the same time to escape American sexism.)
Tanner’s career took off in Paris. He traveled widely through Europe and as far east as Egypt and Palestine and painted scenes from the Bible stories he remembered from childhood. His luminous visions of Jesus Christ’s walk on water (1907) and reading lesson (1910-1914) are the two stronger works in the Art Center’s collection, glowing with soft light and swirling blues and greens.
“His use of color was just amazing,” Burkhalter said. “You can see how he wove together Impressionism, Realism and other styles from the time.”