"Modern Spirit" is probably as comprehensive a Tanner survey as could be assembled. Academy curator Anna O. Marley secured several key loans from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, particularly The Resurrection of Lazarus.
Unfortunately, the show is missing four other key pictures, including the only two depictions of African American life that Tanner is known to have painted. This isn't Marley's fault.
The two genre paintings, The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor, are arguably Tanner's most popular images. The first is owned by the Hampton University Museum in Virginia, the second by Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr. In both cases, loans were sought but were not granted.
Daniel in the Lions' Den, a biblical subject, is too fragile to travel from Los Angeles, while the fourth missing painting, Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City, is in the White House collection and can't be lent outside the federal museum system.
The absence of Sand Dunes and the two scenes of black life might not seem like a big deal - after all, the exhibition contains more than 100 works. But it means that the survey of Tanner's career is slightly less fully rounded than, ideally, it should be.
His reputation rests mainly on his interpretations of biblical themes, such as Lazarus and the fragile Daniel in the Lions' Den, one of his most unorthodox and intense images of this kind.
Yet even though his father was a clergyman and subsequently a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner wasn't drawn initially to biblical subjects. As a young painter who had studied at the academy with Thomas Eakins, he gravitated toward animal subjects as a specialization.
