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Yves Tanguy
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Nationality
French & American
Known for
Painting
Period
Surrealism
Name
Yves Tanguy
Movement
Surrealism
Patrons
Pierre Matisse
Born
January 5, 1900 (
1900-01-05
)
Paris, France
Died
January 15, 1955, Woodbury, Connecticut, United States
Artwork
Mama - Papa Is Wounded!, The Furniture of Time, The Rapidity of Sleep, Slowly Toward the North, Extinction of Useless Lights
Similar People
Max Ernst, Kay Sage, Giorgio de Chirico, Andre Masson, Man Ray
Yves Tanguy Artworks
Yves Tanguy
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy (January 5, 1900 – January 15, 1955), known as Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.
Tanguy, the son of a retired navy captain, was born at the Ministry of Naval Affairs on Place de la Concorde in Paris, France. His parents were both of Breton origin. After his father's death in 1908, his mother moved back to her native Locronan, Finistère, and he ended up spending much of his youth living with various relatives.
In 1918, Tanguy briefly joined the merchant navy before being drafted into the Army, where he befriended Jacques Prévert. At the end of his military service in 1922, he returned to Paris, where he worked various odd jobs. He stumbled upon a painting by Giorgio de Chirico and was so deeply impressed he resolved to become a painter himself in spite of his complete lack of formal training.
Tanguy had a habit of being completely absorbed by the current painting he was working on. This way of creating artwork may have been due to his very small studio which only had enough room for one wet piece.
Through his friend Prévert, in around 1924 Tanguy was introduced into the circle of surrealist artists around André Breton. Tanguy quickly began to develop his own unique painting style, giving his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1927, and marrying his first wife Jeannette Ducrocq (1896-1977) later that same year. During this busy time of his life, Breton gave Tanguy a contract to paint 12 pieces a year. With his fixed income, he painted less and ended up creating only eight works of art for Breton.
In December 1930, at an early screening of Buñuel and Dali's L'Age d'Or, right-wing activists went to the lobby of the cinema where the film was being screened, and destroyed art works by Dalí, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Tanguy, and others.
Throughout the 1930s, Tanguy adopted the bohemian lifestyle of the struggling artist with gusto, leading eventually to the failure of his first marriage. He had an intense affair with Peggy Guggenheim in 1938 when he went to London with his wife Jeannette Ducrocq to hang his first retrospective exhibition in Britain at her gallery Guggenheim Jeune. The exhibition was a great success and Guggenheim wrote in her autobiography that "Tanguy found himself rich for the first time in his life". She purchased his pictures Toilette de L'Air and The Sun in Its Jewel Case (Le Soleil dans son écrin) for her collection. Tanguy also painted Peggy two beautiful earrings. The affair continued in both London and Paris and only finished when Tanguy met a fellow Surrealist artist who would become his second wife.
In 1938, after seeing the work of fellow artist Kay Sage, Tanguy began a relationship which led to his second marriage. With the outbreak of World War II, Sage moved back to her native New York, and Tanguy, judged unfit for military service, followed her. He would spend the rest of his life in the United States. Sage and Tanguy were married in Reno, Nevada on August 17, 1940. Toward the end of the war, the couple moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, converting an old farmhouse into an artists' studio. They spent the rest of their lives there. In 1948, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
In January 1955, Tanguy suffered a fatal stroke at Woodbury. His body was cremated and his ashes preserved until Sage's death in 1963. Later, his ashes were scattered by his friend Pierre Matisse on the beach at Douarnenez in his beloved Brittany, together with those of his wife.
Style and legacy
Tanguy's paintings have a unique, immediately recognizable style of nonrepresentational surrealism. They show vast, abstract landscapes, mostly in a tightly limited palette of colors, only occasionally showing flashes of contrasting color accents. Typically, these alien landscapes are populated with various abstract shapes, sometimes angular and sharp as shards of glass, sometimes with an intriguingly organic look to them, like giant amoebae suddenly turned to stone.
According to Nathalia Brodskaïa, Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927) is one of Tanguy's most impressive paintings. He took the title of this and other works from psychiatric textbooks: "I remember spending a whole afternoon with ... André Breton," he said, "leafing through books on psychiatry in the search for statements of patients which could be used as titles for paintings." Brodskaïa writes that the painting reflects his debt to Giorgio de Chirico – falling shadows and a classical torso – and conjures up a sense of doom: the horizon, the emptiness of the plain, the solitary plant, the smoke, the helplessness of the small figures. Tanguy said that it was an image he saw entirely in his imagination before starting to paint it.
Tanguy's style was an important influence on several younger painters, such as Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, and Esteban Francés, who adopted a Surrealist style in the 1930s. Later, Tanguy's paintings (and, less directly, those of de Chirico) influenced the style of the French animated movie Le Roi et l'oiseau, by Paul Grimault and Prévert.
1920s
Vite! Vite! (1924)
Rue de la Santé (1925) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Self Portrait (1925) Private Collection
Dancing (1925) Private Collection
The Testament of Jacques Prévert (1925) Private Collection
Fantômas (1925–26) Private Collection
The Storm (1926)
The Lighthouse (1926) Private Collection, France
The Girl with Red Hair (1926) Private Collection
Title Unknown (The Giantess, The Ladder) (1926) Private Collection
I Came As I Had Promised. Adieu (1926) Dieter Scharf Collection Foundation
The Storm (Black Landscape) (1926) Philadelphia Museum of Art
Four-Part Screen (The Firmament) (1932) Berardo Collection, Lisbon
The Heart of the Tower (1933) Private Collection
The Certitude of the Never-Seen (1933) The Art Institute of Chicago
Between the Grass and the Wind (1934) Private Collection
The End of the Rope (1934) Private Collection
I Am Waiting for You (1934) Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Passage of a Smile (1935) The Toledo Museum of Art
Échelles (1935) Manchester Art Gallery
The Meeting-Place of Parallels (1935) Kunstmuseum, Basel
Title Unknown (Metaphysical Landscape) (1935) Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
Palming (1935) Private Collection, Hamburg
The New Nomads (1935) John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota
The Geometer of Dreams (1935) Private Collection
Untitled (1935) Collection of Carlo F. Bilotti
Heredity of Acquired Characteristics (1936) Menil Collection, Houston
L’Extinction des Especes (1936)
From the Other Side of the Bridge (1936) Private Collection, New York
The Nest of the Amphioxus (1936) Museum of Grenoble
Treasures of the Sea (1936) Private Collection
Fragile (1936)
Way of Heredity (1936) Private Collection
The Air in Her Mirror (1937) Sprengel Museum, Hanover
Les Filles des Conséquences (1937)
The Doubter (The Interrogation) (1937) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC
The Sun in its Jewel Case (1937) Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Lingering Day (1937) Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Movements and Acts (1937) Smith College Museum of Art
Title Unknown (Landscape) (1938) Private Collection
Familiar Little Person (1938) Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Ennui and Tranquility (1938) Private Collection
Boredom and tranquillity (1938) The Jeffrey H. Loria Collection
Hidden Thoughts (My Hidden Thoughts) (1939) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
If it Were (1939) Private Collection
La Rue aux Levres (1939)
The Furniture of Time (1939) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Great Nacre Butterfly (1939) Private Collection
Second Thoughts (1939) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Satin Tuning-Fork (1939) Collection of Mr and Mrs Jacques Gelman
1940s
The Satin Tuning Fork (1940)
Belomancy II (1940) Private Collection
The Witness (1940) Collection of Mr and Mrs Frederick R. Weisman
A Little Later (1940) Private Collection
The Earth and the Air (1941) Baltimore Museum of Art
On Slanting Ground (1941) Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
The Five Strangers (1941) Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
The Palace of Windowed Rocks (1942) Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Naked Water (1942) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC
The Long Rain (1942) Honolulu Museum of Art
Indefinite Divisibility (1942) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
The Absent Lady (1942) Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
The Great Mutation (1942) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Slowly Toward the North (1942) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Stone in the Tree (1942) The Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe
Minotaur (1943) Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Through Birds, Through Fire and Not Through Glass (1943) The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Reply to Red (1943) The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Zones D’Instabilite (1943)
Equicocal Colors (1943) Private Collection
The Prodigal Never Returns I (1943) Collection of Mr and Mrs Leonard Yaseen
The Prodigal Never Returns II (1943) Collection of Mr and Mrs Leonard Yaseen
The Prodigal Never Returns III (1943) Collection of Mr and Mrs Leonard Yaseen
The Prodigal Never Returns IV (1943) Collection of Mr and Mrs Leonard Yaseen
Distances (1944) Private Collection
Twice (1944) Private Collection
The Tower of the Sea (1944) Washington University Gallery of Art, St Louis
My Life, White and Black (1944) Collection of Mr and Mrs Jacques Gelman
The Rapidity of Sleep (1945) The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
There, Motion Has Not Yet Ceased (1945) Richard S Zeisler Collection, New York
There the Mouth has not Ceased Yet (1945) Collection of Richard S. Zeisler
The Provider (1945) Private Collectio
Hands and Gloves (1946) Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne
Clothed in Wakefulness (1947) Collection of Mr and Mrs Isidore M. Cohen
There Is (1947) Private Collection
At the Risk of the Sun (1947) Nelson Gallery - Atkins Museum, Kansas City
From One Night to Another (1947) de Young Museum, San Francisco
First Stone (1947) Private Collection
Who Will Answer (1948) Collection of Mr and Mrs Herbert Lust
Fear (1949) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1950s
Rose of the Four Winds (1950) Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
The Immense Window (1950) Private Collection
From Pale Hands to Weary Skies (1950) Yale University Art Gallery
To look at in Winter (1950) Smith College Museum of Art
Unlimited Sequences (1951) Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia
The Invisibles / The Transparent Ones (1951) Tate Modern, London
The Hunted Sky (1951) Menil Collection, Houston
Time Without Change (1951) University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson
The Stars in Open-Work (1951) The Art Institute of Chicago
Because (1951) Williams College Museum of Art
This Morning (1951) Collection of Nesuhi Ertegun
Through the Forest (1952)
The Mirage of Time (1954) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Saltimbanques (1954) Richard L Feigen, New York
Imaginary Numbers (1954) Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
From Green to White (1954) Collection of Mr and Mrs Jacques Gelman
Multiplication of the Arcs (1954) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Books about Yves Tanguy
Olivier Berggruen, Yves Tanguy, Peintre De L’Illusion Métaphysique in Yves Tanguy, Malingue (2002), pp. 9 - 13
An Important Private Collection of Works by Yves Tanguy (2001) Published by Christie's New York
Yves Tanguy: The Graphic Work (1976) Published by Wolfgang Wittrock - Authors: Wolfgang Wittrock and Stanley W Hayter
Yves Tanguy (1974) Published by Acquavella Galleries, Inc. - Authors: Nicholas M Acquavella and John Ashbery
Yves Tanguy (1974) Published by Éditions Filipacchi - Author: Daniel Marchesseau
Yves Tanguy (First Edition 1955, Second Edition 1977) Published by Museum of Modern Art - Author: James Thrall Soby
Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy (2011) Published by the Katonah Museum of Art and the Mint Museum with the Pierre Matisse Foundation, New York - Authors: Stephen Robeson Miller, Jonathan Stuhlman