Posted on Sun, Feb. 22, 2009 Philly Review
Art: He brings fresh life to Old Master-style realism
Stephen Tanis' work shows a modern vision that also embraces tradition.
By Edward Sozanski
Contributing Art Critic
Before Paul Cezanne and his iconoclastic descendants arrive at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Thursday, it's refreshing to be reminded that Old Master-style realism, which modernism is supposed to have rendered obsolete, remains vigorous and relevant, especially in this region.
The vehicle for this affirmation of traditional values is a retrospective exhibition at the University of Delaware for painter Stephen Tanis, who taught there for 28 years, until he retired in 2000.
Tanis is a remarkably robust realist with demonstrable roots in Old Master technique and attitude. In particular, he often resembles a modern incarnation of the Italian master Caravaggio.
His realization of figures and still lifes is exceptionally vibrant, and imbued with such spatial and psychological tension, as to make most of what his contemporaries are producing look insipid by comparison.
In a telling statement displayed on one of the gallery walls, Tanis explains how and why he achieves this effect.
He says his imagery is "built up through a structural process and not merely rendered or copied. I want the issues of color and plane to supersede the concerns of line and value, which are in the domain of drawing."
And so it is with these 33 oils and two works on paper, one a gorgeous still life of flower bulbs in pastel and conté crayon.
Using vivid, and sometimes slightly unnatural, color blushes to construct volumetric evocations of people and objects, Tanis creates pictures that, like sculptural reliefs, generate spatial envelopes that both project and recede from the ostensible picture plane.
This preternatural sense of three-dimensional reality crystallizing out of thin air, like a hologram, is the quality that recalls Caravaggio.
It so enhances the viewer's perception of common objects that they seem surreal in the most literal way - intensified beyond ordinary experience, like digital images in an analog environment.
Tanis' career is bracketed by two self-portraits, one made in 1967 when he was 22 and one made last year. The first is somewhat generic stylistically but revealing of determination and confidence. The second, smaller canvas is reflectively Rembrandtesque. They set the stage for two general groups of pictures, still lifes and figure groups.
The still lifes represent a range of conventions, innovations, and homages to tradition. Some are tabletop arrangements in raking light with patterned carpets and/or rumpled cloths. These affirm the artist's ability to transform simple arrangements into powerful, sensuously charged interior landscapes.
In several paintings,Tanis has placed an elemental still life against a backdrop of an Old-Masterish painting. These he either invents or quotes; in Paolo and Azzolino, for example, the background image is based on Veronese.
These juxtapositions link past and present visually and historically, and feel perfectly natural. They bring history forward, into contemporary life, by reinforcing the idea that the past is inherent in the present.
As one considers them, tradition no longer seems like something to rebel against, but something to respect, enhance, and reconfigure to satisfy current taste.
Other still lifes, particularly more recent ones such as Pomegranates, represent another strategy. Instead of clustering, Tanis deploys a number of like objects across a field, like toy soldiers on a blanket. He tends to use fruits for these, particularly pears, which can be imagined as figure surrogates.
Despite the uniformity of forms, these compositions, so crisply delineated and colored, produce a mesmerizing effect akin to that characteristic of classic Spanish still lifes by Juan Sanchez Cotán, Luis Melendez, and Francisco de Zurbarán.
Tanis' other major preoccupation has been the human figure, sometimes nude and usually presented in a narrative or allegorical context.
In the exhibition, these pictures begin in the mid-1990s with Judgment, in which he incorporates a male and female nude into a fragment of a Last Judgment painting by Peter Paul Rubens. It's a strategy analogous to that used in the more elaborate still lifes.
Judgment is followed by Self-Portrait With Model, in which a female nude kneels on a floorcloth - an artist-and-model scenario - and Tree of Life, in which another nude crouches on a carpet.
Here Tanis offers another time-honored recipe, a lushly articulated body, crowned with glowing auburn hair, juxtaposed against an exuberantly decorative textile, each complementing the other.
Beginning in 2000 with the painting Denouement, Tanis embarked on a more ambitious program for the figure. The paintings became larger and more populated; Scuffle, a scene of conflict, depicts nine people (including the artist), only one of whom is a woman.
These paintings imply narratives; Denouement seems to involve a dispute between a woman and a spouse or lover that's being mediated by a couple who might be her parents and observed by three other people, again including the artist.
Two paintings, Scuffle and Gabriel's Contest, depict physical confrontations between two men. Freethinkers, in which one man probes an opening in the abdomen of another, overtly quotes Caravaggio's portrayal of St. Thomas touching the spear wound in the side of Jesus.
Like Denouement, the three-character Phone Call, in which Tanis includes himself as a principal player rather than an onlooker, also suggests a domestic crisis.
One can readily imagine religious allusions in these works - Jacob wrestling with an angel in Scuffle and Gabriel's Contest, for example - but the situations are sufficiently ambiguous that multiple interpretations are plausible. This deliberate vagueness, which invites viewers to supply the exposition, is what makes the paintings contemporary despite their obvious Old Master antecedents.
Where Caravaggio painted certainties and revealed commonly accepted truths, Tanis paints the uncertainties, dualities, and ambiguities of modern life. He isn't the only painter in the region to do so - Philadelphians Sidney Goodman, Bo Bartlett, and Martha Erlebacher, among others, also have worked this territory effectively.
Yet Tanis' masterly command of form and color gives his paintings exceptional presence, appeal, authority and gravity. They're as solid as granite.
