"Paris Noir - African Americans in the City of Light " Topic
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Tango01 | 02 Feb 2019 12:45 p.m. PST |
"The summer of 1914 was one of the most beautiful that Europeans had experienced in many years. Henry Ossawa Tanner, an African American artist living in Paris, spent that summer working at his rural retreat in the small Picard village of Trepied, glorying in the pure light and air of eastern France and painting scenes of biblical life full of luminous mysticism. On August 1, however, Tanner's peaceful idyll shattered as Europe plunged into the First World War. The approach of German armies forced Tanner and his family to evacuate Trepied, taking refuge in England for two weeks. The outbreak of war made a major impact on Tanner, as he revealed in a letter to a friend: "What right have I to do, what right to be comfortable? In London I saw some of the Canadian contingent and many volunteers, fine, handsome, intelligent men going out to fight, to suffer and to die for principles which I believe in as strongly as they and sit down to paint a little picture, and thus make myself happy--No it cannot be done." During the war years Tanner painted very little. By the end of 1917 he had begun a project with the American Red Cross working with wounded U.S. soldiers in France to raise vegetables. The world of Henry Ossawa Tanner, of Parisian ateliers and cafes, of conversations with artists from around the world and favorable reviews in the French and international press, was light years removed from that of virtually all African Americans in the early twentieth century. War brought these two worlds together. For Tanner this interlude would be brief; after the war he returned to his artistic endeavors, remaining in Paris until his death in 1937. But for the black soldier the glimpse of a world where a man or woman of color could rise to the heights of renown achieved by Henry Ossawa Tanner came as a revelation. African Americans had visited and lived in Paris throughout the nineteenth century, but usually as individuals isolated from one another. The experiences of black American soldiers in war-torn France brought a new type of African American expatriate to Paris, one who both interacted with the French and formed his own community in exile as well. Where Tanner had led, many would now follow, leaving their mark on the City of Light…" Main page link Amicalement Armand
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