Mark Tansey’s “Triumph of the New York School” [by David Lehman]

Mark Tansey is a definitively postmodernist painter. His pictures stand at two removes from nature; not art but art history (or art theory) is his subject. Tansey deals in theories and notions, presenting them with the sort of sharp irony found in the best editorial-page cartoons. His pictures are literary; they tell stories, spin out allegories, or make intellectually complicated witticisms. At the major Tansey exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1994, the most striking and I think best example of the painter's work on display allegorizes a World Historical Event in the annals of modern art. The picture, an oil painting dating from 1984, is called Triumph of the New York School. It records the moment New York supplanted Paris as the art capital of the world and home of the international avant-garde.^[i]

One of Tansey's ironies is that his picture is wholly committed to the representation of a scene and as such stands in diametrical opposition to Abstract Expressionism, the movement that vaulted New York into its position of international dominance. In sepia tones suggestive of an old photograph, with a war-ravaged landscape as backdrop, Tansey's huge canvas -- more than six feet tall and ten feet wide -- depicts one set of military men surrendering to another. The defeated group of soldiers on the left of the painting is dressed in French uniforms from World War I. The victorious men facing them wear the battle fatigues of American soldiers in World War II. At the center of the picture is a table on which the surrender is at this moment being signed by Andre Breton, the leader of the French surrealists and the presumptive spokesman of his era, wearing a combat helmet and great coat.

Breton, who was known as "the Pope of surrealism," is observed approvingly by the commander of the victorious Americans, Clement Greenberg, champion of "American-type painting" (his name for it), whose pronouncements on painterly matters were supposedly heeded, in the galleries and lofts of New York, as though they were the orders of a five-star general. Breton's forces include Pablo Picasso (in a flamboyant fur coat), Henri Matisse, Ferdinand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Rousseau, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the champion of "the New Spirit," who brilliantly promoted the School of Paris, launched Cubism and gave Surrealism its name.^[ii] Greenberg's adjutants are such mainstays of the New York School as the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Arshile Gorky, the sculptor David Smith, and the critic Harold Rosenberg, who vied with Greenberg for the distinction of being the group's chief hierophant. Not only the uniforms but the placement and posture of the figures suggest a clash of periods. The French have a cavalry; the Americans, a news photographer kneeling to take his shot of the magic moment. The French are formal, the Americans at ease. Greenberg, genially slouching, keeps his hands in his pockets. So does Pollock, his prize discovery, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

In composition and scale, Triumph of the New York School evokes the grandeur of a classical surrender scene -- Velazquez's Surrender of Breda (1634-35) -- to make a point. The picture illustrates the allegorical thesis stated succinctly in its title; in effect Tansey visualizes a dead metaphor to revive it. The conceit of the artist as soldier derives from etymology -- from the military origin of the term avant-garde. If the "vanguard" of an army is its assault troops, vanguard artists are the elite officers planning raids and forays into the uncharted regions of the imagination. But Tansey's Triumph of the New York School is based on something more than impressionable conceit: the conviction that what it depicts did in fact happen, and in just this metaphorical way.

It is generally accepted that the old School of Paris, which dominated the first part of this century, was eclipsed by the New York School in the late 1940s. The success of Abstract Expressionism is seen, moreover, to have coincided with a triumph for the city of New York as a milieu, a market, an ambiance, or a headquarters for art and the arts. It could be said that the artistic movement concurrent with Hiroshima and the death camps had superseded the ones associated with the earlier "war to end all wars." The "lost generation" (Gertrude Stein's term) was history; "action painting" (Harold Rosenberg's catchy, existential-sounding term) was now. All this Tansey's picture proclaims, and more: that the avant-garde artist is a militant figure, accustomed to adversarial behavior, for whom conquest and capitulation are the only available choices, because changes in style and fashion in art occur violently, amid competition, and in the face of stalwart resistance.

Tansey's picture is faithful to a script; the advent of the New York School has long been rendered in the terms of a military campaign or athletic contest. The picture's title echoes that of Irving Sandler's standard history of Abstract Expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting (1970). The champions of the new American painting had a penchant for framing the artists' struggle in the context of a competition for global supremacy: New York versus Paris, America versus Europe. Adjectives of choice included triumphant and heroic. This lexicon of triumph now makes people anxious. Recent critics have objected on the grounds that such language smacks of either chauvinism or boosterism. It may also lead to a more profound misunderstanding -- the notion that on some theoretical plane the agents of the abstract revolution were agents of American nationalism. In fact, the avant-garde adventure was not narrowly nationalistic but was as international in outlook and character as in the diverse birth places of the artists themselves, many of whom had come to America from Europe -- from Russia (Rothko), Holland (de Kooning), Armenia (Gorky), Germany (Hans Hofmann), and elsewhere. "Most of us felt that our passionate allegiance was not to American art or in that sense to any national art," Robert Mothwerwell said, "but that there was such a thing as modern art: that it was essentially international in character, that it was the greatest painting adventure of our time, that we wished to participate in it, that we wished to plant it here, that it would blossom in its own way here as it had elsewhere, because beyond national differences there are human similarities that are more consequential."^[iii]

If the metaphor of triumph remains compelling, that is largely because it is historically accurate: New York did displace Paris as the center of modern art, Abstract Expressionism did become the first indigenous American art movement to win international dominance. But for the artists themselves, the most important triumph came at home, not abroad. In 1965 Frank O'Hara -- "our Apollinaire," as Philip Guston dubbed him -- recalled the "violent resistance" facing the American artist in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was, O'Hara warned, all too easy to forget "that period's artistic and political isolationism (how controversial then were Gertrude Stein and Wendell Wilkie!), the mania for Impressionist masters, the conviction, when there was any interest at all, that avant-garde was not only a French word but an Ecole de Paris monopoly. But the greatest resistance of all came from other American painters -- the regionalists, the Social Realists, and the traditionalists."^[iv] The artistic triumph of New York was, in short, a victory over public rejection, scorn, and blind allegiance to tradition. The spirit of the new, vacating Paris, had arrived like a guest who had been invited for cocktails in June and stayed for the rest of the summer.

Some events in the history of art really do seem to occur with the speed and decisiveness with which, for example, the sinking of the Japanese carriers at Midway determined the naval war in the Pacific. The shift of the world's center of artistic gravity from Paris to New York would appear to be one such event. It was as momentous as it was unexpected, an incidental byproduct of the global tremors of the wartorn 1940s. It happened suddenly -- over the course of a few years commonly thought of as the "heroic" period of the New York School.

-- David Lehman (1994)

[i]. "Connections: Mark Tansey," at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston May 11 - August 7, 1994.

[ii]. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 296.

[iii]. "Robert Motherwell," in Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: Braziller, 1975), p. 66.

[iv]. Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles, p. 66.

Comments

[David Alexander]

David, I enjoyed this piece enormously. Mark Tansey is a favorite painter of mine, and you made clear how brilliant, both intellectually and pictorially, this painting is. And funny! Tansey seems to have dropped out of public attention. It's great that you have brought him back now.

[David Lehman]

Thanks so much for this comment, David. It means a lot coming from you.

[tom tulinsky]

"The French have a cavalry; the Americans, a news photographer". The Americans also have an armored car.

The casual dress of the Americans is very close to that of General MacAuthur and others who accepted Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. A show of power and lack of respect to the Japanese who were wearing tuxedos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

(For the surrender of Germany the Americans were more formally dressed).

[David Lehman]

Tom Tulinsky: thanks for your comment. How would American GIs and their folks in 1945 respond to your observation that, in Mark Tansey's painting, the dress of the Americans echoes the attire of General MacArthur that showed a "lack of respect to the Japanese who were wearing tuxedos" when they surrendered to us?