Theology

Henry Ossawa Tanner lived a life between two shores of the Atlantic -America and France -and his navigation of these national boundaries deeply affected his art. Tanner pursued his prolific body of biblical paintings solely during this time "in between," never painting a religious scene on American soil. While some have asserted that he "never turned his back on race" it seems that he left America for Europe in 1891 to transcend race. This talk contends that a Transatlantic vision of space, when placed alongside the precedent of "betweenness" in theology (i.e., Christians as pilgrims wandering in the present age), allowed Tanner to transcend racial rhetoric. Tanner's sojourning religious pictures -like his images of flight and exile taken from the Christian narrative -thus became universal statements about human experience, national and spiritual belonging, and particularly the shifting experience of nationality at home and abroad. These biblical analogies and scriptural surrogates reveal Tanner as an itinerant artist, who found he belonged not on one shore or the other but in the peregrinating, borderline space between the two.

The personal perspectives, professional interests, and visual models that influenced Horatio Greenough in crafting paired busts of “Lucifer” (ca. 1841–42) and “Christ” (ca. 1845) reveal both the aesthetic concerns of his era and the transnational nature of his sculptural enterprise. Examining links between objects and their beholders and the fraught relationships between sculpture and spirituality, past and present, in the United States, this article highlights Greenough’s ambitious efforts to produce a spiritual spectacle through this little-studied pair. As later iconoclastic reactions to Greenough’s busts also suggest, particularly in America embodied images possess the power to disturb or enthrall.

The W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation Fund and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art support exhibitions and programs at the Georgia Museum of Art. The Georgia Council for the Arts also provides support through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. GCA receives support from its partner agency, the National Endowment for the Arts. Individuals, foundations and corporations provide additional museum support through their gifts to the University of Georgia Foundation.

" | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: ""Extra Ordinary," which accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Georgia Museum of Art, surveys a range of American artists who embraced realism, representation, and classical artistic techniques in the face of the rising tide of abstraction at mid-century. Through sharp focus, suggestive ambiguity and an uncanny assemblage of ordinary things, their works not only show that the extraordinary is possible, but also conjure the strangeness and wonder of everyday life. It takes as its point of departure the 1943 show "American Realists and Magic Realists" at the Museum of Modern Art-when the term "magic realism" entered the American art historical lexicon-and will feature a suite of paintings originally included in MoMA' s show.