"Art history bills itself as an orthodoxy, a linear progression of techniques, movements and prescriptions. Tansey insists that the history of art is more complex, a circle, perhaps; more likely, a synchronous web."
A dialogue between epochs embodied in a sweeping monochromatic tableau, Triumph Over Mastery II from 1987 sees Mark Tansey contemplate the dialectical conflict between our reverence for history and our relentless march of progress. With one arm holding onto a ladder, the other brashly sweeping a paint roller, the figure in the present work methodically erases Christ’s image in Michelangelo’s sixteenth-century The Last Judgement, painting over it with the renegade and revolutionary nothingness of pure white. Rife with latent allegory and mythology, Mark Tansey’s illustrious oeuvre offers a layered painterly historiography of the philosophical conundrums that preoccupy the human condition, and here, the artist meditates on the shifting paradigms of artistic creation in an uncertain era of postmodernity. Not only was Triumph Over Mastery II prominently illustrated on the cover of Arthur Danto’s 1992 monograph of the artist, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, but this masterwork has also appeared in some of Mark Tansey’s most paramount international museum exhibitions, including his major 1993-1994 retrospective, Mark Tansey, which traveled from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, among other institutions. Extending a bleak reminder of the fragility of human accomplishment, the present work powerfully expands upon the philosophical concerns explored in Tansey’s earlier sister painting, Triumph Over Mastery, which now resides in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Triumph Over Mastery II is further distinguished by its exceptional provenance, having remained in the esteemed collection of Emily Fisher Landau since she acquired it in 1987 from Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, one of Mark Tansey’s earliest principal dealers.
Standing high on a ladder and wielding a paint roller, our bare-backed protagonist in Triumph Over Mastery II covers with broad, irreverent sweeps of whitewash one of human history’s most gloried and epic artifacts: Michelangelo’s Renaissance magnum opus, The Last Judgement fresco, located in the Sistine Chapel of Vatican City. He resolves to replace the canonical masterpiece with the profane bareness of white painting, thus enacting the modernist device of painterly effacement famously championed by the likes of Kazimir Malevich, Robert Rauschenberg, or Robert Ryman. Amidst this iconoclastic procedure, the painter continues by obliterating the central, muscular figure of Christ, having already erased His hand, once upraised almighty to pass heavenly judgment on the destiny of souls. Even more, the painter has coated over the shadow of his own left hand, too, which disappears along with Michelangelo’s mural depiction of the tortured souls damned to descend upon hell’s shores. As he remains perched quietly at work, the tranquility of the anonymous painter stands in jarring contrast to the monumental cultural loss and existential self-erasure that is implicit in his sacrilegious actions. Or, one might argue, he is an avant garde revolutionary bravely paving way for an immaculate canvas—a tabula rasa full of inaugural potential, a blank slate for new creative vision.
Triumph Over Mastery II witnesses Tansey poignantly grappling with such cyclical contradictions that are intrinsic to the artist’s role: as both creator and destroyer, the artist is one who is simultaneously beholden to tradition while driven and expected to challenge it. In this context, the title itself posits a paradox: if the art historical project of postmodernism asserts to revise or reject the core tenets of modernism—indeed, to “triumph over mastery”—then Tansey contributes to, yet laments, the artistic progressivism of his contemporary age. Just as Michelangelo’s Renaissance heralded a radical and revolutionary departure from the Middle Ages, Tansey is radically self-conscious that each successive artistic movement must build upon—and sometimes, against—the storied accomplishments of its predecessors. Tansey's own silhouette eclipses Michelangelo’s iconic self-portrait in The Last Judgement, his omnipotent painterly gestures paralleling Christ’s powers to either redeem or condemn in the fresco. Indeed, the fictional painter in Triumph Over Mastery II reifies this unavoidable Oedipal struggle at the heart of art history: each new wave of artists, including Tansey himself, must upend the ideas championed by generations past.
Notably, Tansey’s mastery over his chosen medium in the present work is as exacting as the technique of fresco painting that he references: first applying a heavily gessoed ground to the surface, Tansey successively adds layer upon layer of paint to build up a rich surface from which he carves and swipes away with a variety of tools. Working within the limited six-hour time frame before his paint dries and becomes unpliable, Tansey operates under formidable time constraints. Through his additive and reductive method, Tansey takes on the triple role of draftsman, painter and sculptor at once. His images thus emerge from the monochromatic abyss by means of a constant process of wiping and pulling pigment away in order to render the painstaking details that fill the vast expanse. In Triumph Over Mastery II, Tansey’s subtractive process and muted palette of crimson and white suffuse the canvas with a somber and elegiac sensibility, not only underscoring the gravity of the allegorical scene that he visualizes, but also offering a sobering and nostalgic revelation into the broader ethics of historical advancement.
"I think of the painted picture as an embodiment of the very problem that we face with the notion of 'reality'. The problem or question is, which reality? In a painted picture, is it the depicted reality, or the reality of the picture plane, or the multidimensional reality the artist and viewer exist in? That all three are involved points to the fact that all pictures are inherently problematic.”
In Triumph Over Mastery II, the timeless clash between the classical and the contemporary ignites a paradoxical discourse on the cyclical nature of art history, one that sees Tansey masterfully extend the mechanics of figurative painting into the philosophical domains of human progress and cultural evolution. In a review of Tansey’s 1993 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where the present work was prominently featured, Susan Kandel succinctly observes, “Art history bills itself as an orthodoxy, a linear progression of techniques, movements and prescriptions. Tansey insists that the history of art is more complex, a circle, perhaps; more likely, a synchronous web” (Susan Kandel, “Nothing Nostalgic About Tansey’s Works,” Los Angeles Times, 1 July 1993, online). In the end, the painter in Triumph Over Mastery II who dares to overwrite the art historical legacy of Michelangelo is of the same primordial red that he is attempting to hide with white. Tansey seems to suggest that it is ultimately an impossible and an absurd task – to divorce oneself from the shadows of time, to liberate culture from the relics of human civilization; instead, the artist warns against the perils of triumphalism that so pervade his contemporaneous postmodern zeitgeist.
