The Innocent Eye Test

Mark Tansey

A well-known New York City artist, Mark Tansey was born in California in 1949, the son of two art historians. His work has been described as surrealistic and postmodern; his subject matter is often ironic. He uses photographic images from popular culture, academia, and art history, relocating and recombining them in order to comment on humanity. The Innocent Eye Test (1981), a painting that hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, comments on the relationship between the artist and the viewer, an important concern of Tansey’s. The image shows a cow examining Young Bull, a 1647 oil painting by Paulus Potter that hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. In the background is one of Monet’s Haystack paintings from the early 1890s.

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