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Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announces Henry Ossawa Tanner. Modern

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts presents Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern an exhibition on view from January 27 through April 15, 2012. Opening Reception: Friday, January 27, 2012.


Henry Ossawa Tanner, View of The Seine, Looking Toward Notre Dame, 1896, Oil on canvas, 14 7/8 x 20 1/8 in., Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

The subject of this exhibition is the career and life of the artist Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937) – including the pioneering African-American artist’s upbringing in Philadelphia in the years after the Civil War; the artist’s success as an American expatriate artist at the highest levels of the international art world at the turn of the 20th century; Tanner’s role as a leader of an artist’s colony in rural France and his unique contributions in aid of American servicemen to the Red Cross efforts in WWI France; his modernist invigoration of religious painting deeply rooted in his own faith; Tanner’s depictions of the Holy Land and North Africa interpreted through comparison with contemporary French orientalist painting and photography; and the scientific and technical innovations of the artist’s oeuvre.

Henry O. Tanner was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1879 to 1885. PAFA is proud to organize this exhibition, and especially to elevate Tanner’s reputation through new scholarship and to bring his greatest works together for the first time in a generation. – www.pafa.org

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