Mark Tansey
Landscape

• Look closely at the jumble of faces and figures. Do you recognize anyone? What similarities do you notice amongst these figures? What differences?
  
• Why would the artist reach across time and space to combine an assortment of historical figures?  
  

Although titled Landscape, Mark Tansey’s painting has little to do with nature. Tansey uses artistic conventions of landscape, such as a horizon line and receding space, but the scene is fantastical and imaginative. A mountain of crumbled figures dominates the center of the canvas, representing dismantled sculptures of prominent male figures from history.

The message is contradictory—leaders’ legacies are preserved through art, but whose legacies will escape the dustbin of history? The image alludes to contemporary mass media, in which bits and pieces of information break loose of their historical grounding and freely combine into new configurations. Tansey’s one color palette is reminiscent of sepia-toned photographs, old films, or vintage television.

• Why do we bother to examine the past?
• What do you think about these figures who, once important and well-known in their own time, now lie in a fragmentary pile, broken and forgotten? How can you weave your past, present, and future into a legacy that will be remembered?  
• What does power have to do with justice?