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Emily Fisher Landau was, simply put, one of the greatest collectors and patrons of the twentieth century. Her legacy is set apart for her deep and longstanding involvement with leading institutions, in particular the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as her profound engagement with the art and artists of her time and her unerring instinct as a collector at the highest level. Fisher Landau assembled one of the greatest collections of modern and contemporary art – over 100 works of which are coming to auction at Sotheby’s on 8–9 November.
Join us over the next 20 days leading up to the Emily Fisher Landau Evening Auction on 8 November as our specialists spotlight 20 key works from the Collection, celebrating their impact on twentieth-century art. Here, Julian Dawes reflects on the significance of Mark Tansey’s Installing the Lens (1993) as part of our series The Emily Fisher Landau Collection: Twentieth Century Art in Twenty Unforgettable Works.
With a captivating, cerulean palette, Mark Tansey’s Installing the Lens from1993 is an enigmatic painting that explores the blurred boundaries between reality and representation. The artwork depicts anonymous laborers installing a structural lens within a cavernous tunnel, evoking Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and its investigation of the nature of reality and perception. Tansey’s meticulous subtractive painting technique and the subterranean cave motif make this work a significant contribution to his critical oeuvre, challenging conventional notions of imagery and inviting viewers to ponder the mysteries that lie beneath the surface of images.
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Tansey’s scene constructs an optical illusion that parallels the structure of the human eye, extending a visual metaphor for the fallibility of human sight and images. Probing the ever-shifting boundaries between reality and representation to explore the phenomenology of visual perception, Tansey variously interweaves labyrinthine literary and philosophical references ranging from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to the common idiom “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Obscured figures work to install a lens at the end of a cavernous tunnel. The focal point references Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” At the crux of this text, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine a cave populated by chained prisoners who believe that the shadows cast by objects and events outside are, in fact, reality. Trapped and unaware of their own limited perspective, the prisoners of the cave are, like the laborers here, not seeing reality but instead, a mere representation of it – a parable for the invisible truths that lurk beneath the apparent surface of things.
Extending this allegory into the mechanism of images, Tansey questions the very nature of realism itself, seeking to expose the facade inherent in pictorial representation, or the fallibility of the image.
Tansey’s oeuvre unravels modes of perception and representation, continuously testing the eye and eluding narrative clarity in favor of incredulous wonder. When postmodernist thought gained traction in the 1970s with the Pictures generation – including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler – artists concerned with the mechanics of picture-making and representation intentionally moved away from the medium of painting.
Committed to persistently questioning the nature of images, Tansey returned to figuration with full force, invoking the tradition of history and nature painting while presenting a resolutely contemporary image.
Tansey’s resolutely cobalt palette generates the grisaille and sepia-like atmosphere of a fictive snapshot. Inspired by photographs and executed with meticulous detail, Tansey’s carefully planned compositions are borne from a subtractive painting process whereby he covers the canvas in monochromatic pigments before steadfastly removing layers of paint to reveal the overall image. Rendering the canvas impressively in a single tonal range, Tansey imbues his paintings with a distinct mystique that connects them with his litany of visual and rhetorical archival source material.
The Emily Fisher Landau Collection includes several works by Tansey, capturing myriad aspects of the artist’s oeuvre and working methods. Oil Sketch for Mont Saint-Victoire in the Day Auction on 9 November is a study in oil for the painting of the same title, with annotations that capture the artist’s approach to the painted medium and the very idea of a picture, further reflecting the meticulous and academic process the artist undertakes for each painting.
