The picture, an oil painting dating from 1984, is called Triumph of the New York School . It records a thrilling moment presumed to have taken place in the late 1940s, the moment New York supplanted Paris as the art capital of the world and home of the international avant-garde.

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 the New York school of painting into a position of international dominance. In sepia tones suggestive of an old photograph, with a war-ravaged landscape as backdrop, Tansey's huge canvas 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 André Breton, the leader of the French surrealists and the presumptive spokesman of his era. 

Breton, who was known as "the Pope of surrealism," is observed approvingly by the commander of the victorious Americans, the art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of "Americantype 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, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Rousseau, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who brilliantly promoted the school of Paris, launched cubism, and championed surrealism. 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.