Yves Tanguy

original lithograph

1947

Yves Tanguy (1900 – 1955) was a French surrealist painter. Son of a retired navy captain, he was born at the Ministry of Naval Affairs on Place de la Concorde in Paris. After his father's death when he was 8, his mother moved back to her native Locronan, Finistere, 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 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 a friend, around 1924 Tanguy was introduced into the circle of surrealist artists around Andre Breton. Tanguy quickly began to develop his own unique painting style, giving his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1927. 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". 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.