Lot 40 A
MARK TANSEY (B. 1945)
Mont Sainte-Victoire #1
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USD 8,000,000–12,000,000
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Painted in 1987, Mont Sainte-Victoire #1 is likely the most important and well-known painting of Mark Tansey’s career, a richly-detailed panorama steeped in historical allusion. With its seductive surface drenched in florid, wine-soaked hues, the composition is powerful and mysterious, offering up a compelling set of visual riddles, which Tansey has rendered with breathless technical virtuosity. Presided over by the shadow of Cezanne’s Mont-Sainte-Victoire, Tansey depicts a group of French soldiers who have discarded their uniforms to bathe in a clear, still pool. In Tansey’s hands, however, all is not as it seems. Flipped 180-degrees, the men have become women, and the mountain is now a dark, cavernous pit. It is here that Tansey’s imagery breaks free from mere depiction to become something larger, delving into the world of metaphor and allusion, which he uses to comment on painting in a postmodern world.
The story of Mont Sainte-Victoire #1 begins in the advent of Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, in 1987. Curator, Edward Fry was paying a visit to Tansey studio when he stumbled upon this extraordinary composition. Immediately enamored, Fry asked the artist to create a second copy for his exhibition (the present version remained in the artist’s private collection for over a decade). Acting as a sort of turning point in his career, Mont Sainte-Victoire developed from “the most complex set of preliminary studies Tansey ever made,” with the artist “inserting more of his reading in philosophy, psychology, history and science into his art” (P. Sims, Mark Tansey: Art and Source, exh. cat., Seattle Art Museum, 1990, p. 20).
In Mont Sainte-Victoire #1, Tansey brings to life a mysterious tableau, where a group of men have abandoned their uniforms to bathe in a clear mountain pool, the famous mountain looming behind them. A few French soldiers stand to the left, where the arching trees of Cezanne’s Large Bathers (1900-06, Philadelphia Museum of Art) are seen in the background. Turning the painting upside-down, we see that the reflections of the bathers don’t match up. Instead, we have discovered a feminine world, where women enjoy the pleasures of a cool dip in the pool. The French soldiers now gone, a young woman gazes up at the sky, perhaps through binoculars, where the figure of the pointing French soldier used to be. Taking the place of the French general is a mystic clad in long robes. Rather than military conquest, the figures in this feminine realm enjoy the sensorial pleasures of the body, and partake of the joy of simply looking, gazing at the splendor of the natural world.
“The painted picture knows itself to be metaphorical, rhetorical, transformational [and] fictional” Tansey has said (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 132). Rather than abandon metaphor and allusion entirely—as the preceding generation of Minimalist and Conceptual artists had done—Tansey uses paintings’ metaphorical possibilities as a sort of freeing influence on his work. “I’m not doing pictures of things that actually exist in the world,” he said. “[My] work investigates how different realities interact and abrade…[and these] abrasions start within the medium itself” (M. Tansey, quoted in Discreet Energies: 50 Jahre/Years documenta 1955-2005, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2005, p. 136).
In Mont Sainte-Victoire #1, one of his most complex and compelling paintings, Tansey creates an ever-expanding set of allusions that reference the legacy of Modernist painting and the French avant-garde. At far left, the standing officer in full battle dress is said to be Jean Baudrillard, the so-called guru of Postmodern thought, who presides over the scene as his soldiers motion to the bathers. Jacques Derrida is depicted to the right of the standing men, his bare chest revealed as he removes a long coat. Meanwhile, Roland Barthes, who has now vanished, is only represented by a set of clothes left lying beside the pond.
In Mont Sainte-Victoire #1, Tansey literally portrays the members of the French avant-garde as actual soldiers, playing off the actual meaning of the word “avant-garde,” which refers to the first troops of a military advance. This is an important conceptual trope that recurs in many of his most important paintings of the 1980s, including Forward Retreat (1986; The Broad, Los Angeles) and The Occupation (1984; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). In Triumph of the New York School (1984; Whitney Museum of Art, New York), Tansey portrays with great seriousness the signing of a peace treaty where the French soldiers, represented by André Breton, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, have capitulated to American forces, represented by Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock. In Mont Sainte-Victoire #1, Tansey has spoken of “the demilitarization of the avant-garde, the taking off of the uniforms” (M. Tansey, quoted in A. C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 28).
As the child of Art History professors, Tansey has been immersed in the phenomenological interpretations of art-making since his youth. His father, Richard G. Tansey, contributed to the legendary textbook “Gardner’s Art Through the Ages,” and his mother, Luraine Tansey, developed one of the first computerized archives of slides.
Tansey came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York. At Hunter College, he studied with the art historian Rosalind Krauss, who is known for introducing the work of the Structuralist and Post-Structuralist philosophers into the field of Art History. With Conceptual Art, photography and video-based art in vogue at this time, it is perhaps not surprising that Arthur Crimp would declare the death, or end, of painting in 1981. Paradoxically, it was through Tansey’s readings of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes that provided him with a way to re-engage with figurative painting once again.
Knowing that painting is ultimately metaphorical and referential, Tansey seems to place a veil over our reading of the work, literally cloaking it in a single color in Mont Sainte-Victoire #1. And indeed, Tansey continues to work within a monochromatic palette even in his most recent paintings. This, combined with the precise verisimilitude of its imagery, lends Mont-Sainte Victoire #1 a sense of un-reality, a place that looks and feels recognizable and yet, where things are not quite all that they seem. Indeed, Tansey’s monochromatic palette “permits definition of the representational image as a ‘conjectural field.’” It is a “place where the impossible becomes possible” (Mark Tansey, exh. cat., Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 2005, p. 12).
As the German art historian Daniela Goeller reminds us, “Anyone who tentatively ventures into…deciphering [Tansey's] visual metaphors must be prepared for one adventurous and unexpected twist and turn after another” (M. Goeller, “Believing is Seeing–Mark Tansey’s Allegories of Modernism,” in Ibid., p. 30). Indeed, the series of pictorial allusions that awaits the viewer in Mont Sainte-Victoire #1 is endless, much like a series of nesting dolls. In this way, Tansey’s imagery speaks to each other across time and place, existing in a plurality where the artist is free to pick and choose from any image at will.
Mont Saint-Victoire #1 therefore presents an exciting range of pictorial references: Many of the bathers (both men and women) strike the same pose as those in Edgar Degas’s paintings of bathers and washer-women. The male swimmers are undoubtedly related to those by the great nineteenth-century American painter Thomas Eakins, and the panoramic presentation of an impressive, rocky landscape has its precedent in the work of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. The discarded clothing hanging off of a branch to the left of the water seems to evoke Goya’s Disasters of War. Lastly, the periphery of the canvas verges on sheer abstraction, with the dragged, pulled and scraped areas of paint similar to the method used in Gerhard Richter’s Abstractes Bilder. Luckily for the viewer, uncovering Tansey’s hidden allusions are as enjoyable as simply gazing at the technical skill with which he renders them.
The story of Mont Sainte-Victoire #1 begins in the advent of Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, in 1987. Curator, Edward Fry was paying a visit to Tansey studio when he stumbled upon this extraordinary composition. Immediately enamored, Fry asked the artist to create a second copy for his exhibition (the present version remained in the artist’s private collection for over a decade). Acting as a sort of turning point in his career, Mont Sainte-Victoire developed from “the most complex set of preliminary studies Tansey ever made,” with the artist “inserting more of his reading in philosophy, psychology, history and science into his art” (P. Sims, Mark Tansey: Art and Source, exh. cat., Seattle Art Museum, 1990, p. 20).
In Mont Sainte-Victoire #1, Tansey brings to life a mysterious tableau, where a group of men have abandoned their uniforms to bathe in a clear mountain pool, the famous mountain looming behind them. A few French soldiers stand to the left, where the arching trees of Cezanne’s Large Bathers (1900-06, Philadelphia Museum of Art) are seen in the background. Turning the painting upside-down, we see that the reflections of the bathers don’t match up. Instead, we have discovered a feminine world, where women enjoy the pleasures of a cool dip in the pool. The French soldiers now gone, a young woman gazes up at the sky, perhaps through binoculars, where the figure of the pointing French soldier used to be. Taking the place of the French general is a mystic clad in long robes. Rather than military conquest, the figures in this feminine realm enjoy the sensorial pleasures of the body, and partake of the joy of simply looking, gazing at the splendor of the natural world.
“The painted picture knows itself to be metaphorical, rhetorical, transformational [and] fictional” Tansey has said (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 132). Rather than abandon metaphor and allusion entirely—as the preceding generation of Minimalist and Conceptual artists had done—Tansey uses paintings’ metaphorical possibilities as a sort of freeing influence on his work. “I’m not doing pictures of things that actually exist in the world,” he said. “[My] work investigates how different realities interact and abrade…[and these] abrasions start within the medium itself” (M. Tansey, quoted in Discreet Energies: 50 Jahre/Years documenta 1955-2005, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2005, p. 136).
In Mont Sainte-Victoire #1, one of his most complex and compelling paintings, Tansey creates an ever-expanding set of allusions that reference the legacy of Modernist painting and the French avant-garde. At far left, the standing officer in full battle dress is said to be Jean Baudrillard, the so-called guru of Postmodern thought, who presides over the scene as his soldiers motion to the bathers. Jacques Derrida is depicted to the right of the standing men, his bare chest revealed as he removes a long coat. Meanwhile, Roland Barthes, who has now vanished, is only represented by a set of clothes left lying beside the pond.
In Mont Sainte-Victoire #1, Tansey literally portrays the members of the French avant-garde as actual soldiers, playing off the actual meaning of the word “avant-garde,” which refers to the first troops of a military advance. This is an important conceptual trope that recurs in many of his most important paintings of the 1980s, including Forward Retreat (1986; The Broad, Los Angeles) and The Occupation (1984; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). In Triumph of the New York School (1984; Whitney Museum of Art, New York), Tansey portrays with great seriousness the signing of a peace treaty where the French soldiers, represented by André Breton, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, have capitulated to American forces, represented by Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock. In Mont Sainte-Victoire #1, Tansey has spoken of “the demilitarization of the avant-garde, the taking off of the uniforms” (M. Tansey, quoted in A. C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 28).
As the child of Art History professors, Tansey has been immersed in the phenomenological interpretations of art-making since his youth. His father, Richard G. Tansey, contributed to the legendary textbook “Gardner’s Art Through the Ages,” and his mother, Luraine Tansey, developed one of the first computerized archives of slides.
Tansey came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York. At Hunter College, he studied with the art historian Rosalind Krauss, who is known for introducing the work of the Structuralist and Post-Structuralist philosophers into the field of Art History. With Conceptual Art, photography and video-based art in vogue at this time, it is perhaps not surprising that Arthur Crimp would declare the death, or end, of painting in 1981. Paradoxically, it was through Tansey’s readings of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes that provided him with a way to re-engage with figurative painting once again.
Knowing that painting is ultimately metaphorical and referential, Tansey seems to place a veil over our reading of the work, literally cloaking it in a single color in Mont Sainte-Victoire #1. And indeed, Tansey continues to work within a monochromatic palette even in his most recent paintings. This, combined with the precise verisimilitude of its imagery, lends Mont-Sainte Victoire #1 a sense of un-reality, a place that looks and feels recognizable and yet, where things are not quite all that they seem. Indeed, Tansey’s monochromatic palette “permits definition of the representational image as a ‘conjectural field.’” It is a “place where the impossible becomes possible” (Mark Tansey, exh. cat., Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 2005, p. 12).
As the German art historian Daniela Goeller reminds us, “Anyone who tentatively ventures into…deciphering [Tansey's] visual metaphors must be prepared for one adventurous and unexpected twist and turn after another” (M. Goeller, “Believing is Seeing–Mark Tansey’s Allegories of Modernism,” in Ibid., p. 30). Indeed, the series of pictorial allusions that awaits the viewer in Mont Sainte-Victoire #1 is endless, much like a series of nesting dolls. In this way, Tansey’s imagery speaks to each other across time and place, existing in a plurality where the artist is free to pick and choose from any image at will.
Mont Saint-Victoire #1 therefore presents an exciting range of pictorial references: Many of the bathers (both men and women) strike the same pose as those in Edgar Degas’s paintings of bathers and washer-women. The male swimmers are undoubtedly related to those by the great nineteenth-century American painter Thomas Eakins, and the panoramic presentation of an impressive, rocky landscape has its precedent in the work of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. The discarded clothing hanging off of a branch to the left of the water seems to evoke Goya’s Disasters of War. Lastly, the periphery of the canvas verges on sheer abstraction, with the dragged, pulled and scraped areas of paint similar to the method used in Gerhard Richter’s Abstractes Bilder. Luckily for the viewer, uncovering Tansey’s hidden allusions are as enjoyable as simply gazing at the technical skill with which he renders them.