The political marginalization of an artist

Speaker tells of Tanner’s ostracism by peers for paucity of ‘racial realism’

By Ken Gewertz

Harvard News Office

It wasn’t easy for a black person to become an artist in late 19th century America. Even for Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), the son of a famous and influential bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the road held many obstacles. The first and most formidable was Tanner’s father himself, who abhorred the idea of his son becoming an artist and sent him to work in a flour mill, hoping to drive the idea out of his mind. The work caused young Tanner to fall ill, however, and during his convalescence his family relented and encouraged him to return to painting and drawing.

In his early 20s, Tanner attended the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts where he studied with the great American portraitist Thomas Eakins. But his subsequent attempts to earn a living by art ended in failure. Finally in 1888, with the aid of a wealthy Cincinnati couple, he traveled to Paris where he continued his studies and produced some of the paintings for which he is best known, “The Banjo Lesson” and “The Thankful Poor.”

Discouraged by the racism he found in the United States, Tanner remained an expatriate for most of his life. Many of his later works, perhaps in deference to his father’s profession, are on biblical themes, and in 1895 his painting “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” won honorable mention in the Paris Salon. This was the turning point in his career. In 1908 a one-man exhibition of his religious paintings was shown in New York, in 1923 he was made an honorary chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor, and in 1927 he became a full academician of America’s National Academy of Design, the first African American to be so honored.

At the height of his fame, however, Tanner found himself under attack by another African American of singular achievements, Alain Locke. A 1907 graduate of Harvard, Locke became the first black Rhodes Scholar, studying philosophy and literature at Hertford College, Oxford. He continued his studies at the University of Berlin and the Collège de France in Paris, then returned to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard. He became chair of the philosophy department at Howard University, a position he held until his retirement in 1953.

An influential writer of critical and ideological essays and promoter of black talent — activities that earned him a reputation as father of the Harlem Renaissance — Locke in 1925 edited a special issue the journal Survey Graphic, featuring art and writing by African Americans. Later, an expanded version of that issue was published as an anthology titled “The New Negro,” including, among others, poetry by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay; essays by James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Locke himself; and drawings by Winold Reiss and Mahonri Young. These volumes helped to consolidate a new conception of blacks as intellectually and culturally independent, proud of their heritage, articulate, self-reflective, and determined to express their unique identity through art and literature.

But as often happens, in order for something new to come into being, the old must be pushed aside. In two essays published in 1925, Locke criticized Tanner’s art as irrelevant because it did not embody what he called “racial realism,” a readiness to engage with the themes and content of African-American life. Art that was by an African American but that was not about African Americans held no value for Locke, regardless of the prestige and honors the artist had accrued.

Locke’s dismissal of Tanner and the meaning of that rejection in the context of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond was the subject of a talk Nov. 28 by Gene Jarrett, associate professor of English at Boston University. Titled “The Conventional Blindness of the Caucasian Eye: Harlem Renaissance and the Problem of Henry Ossawa Tanner,” the talk was sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Jarrett characterized Locke’s view as “an essentialist paradigm of black authenticity” that was in tune with “the new Negro modernism” embraced by black artists and intellectuals of the 1920s. Instead of the skillfully rendered genre studies, landscapes, and biblical scenes for which Tanner had become famous, Locke championed the stark, semi-abstract line drawings and woodcuts of artists like Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce Nugent. In literature he praised the poetry of Sterling Brown for its “bolder and more detached observation,” contrasting it with the older dialect verses of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

In Locke’s view, even Tanner’s paintings of black characters — works that are still popular as reproductions — failed to rise above the level of shallow genre studies. And yet, Jarrett said, such paintings “were more progressive than Locke realized.” “The Banjo Lesson,” for example, which shows an elderly black man teaching the young boy on his lap to play the banjo, treats the figures with dignity and emphasizes the transmission of knowledge from the older to the younger generation.

But these qualities were not enough to exempt Tanner from Locke’s scathing criticism. Tanner, who once said he considered himself an American first and a Negro only second, exemplified a cosmopolitanism and a universalism, which, Jarrett said, “threatened to undermine the doctrine of racial realism.”

The larger question for Jarrett is whether African-American artists earn that designation merely by virtue of being black or must they also portray the African-American experience in modes and styles that are approved by arbiters and gatekeepers like Locke. In his 2006 book, “Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature,” Jarrett considers the question in a larger context, arguing that many writers have been relegated to the margins of the African-American literary canon not because they lack artistic worth, but because they fail to measure up to certain racial or political ideologies that have prevailed at various periods.

Jarrett is interested in expanding our definition of African-American art and literature and in reclaiming artists and artworks that occupy the margins of the canon merely because they exemplify a more universalist perspective that does not reflect narrow ideological requirements. Becoming aware of the power of such ideologies is important, he said, because they shape, often unconsciously, our experience of art.

“They have determined the way authors think about and write African-American literature; the way publishers classify and distribute it; the way bookstores receive and sell it; the way libraries catalog and shelve it; the way readers locate and retrieve it; the way teachers … scholars, and anthologists use it; and the way students learn from it.”

ken_gewertz@harvard.edu