Yves Tanguy

French surrealist painter Yves Tanguy was renowned for his misshapen rocks and molten surfaces that defined the Surrealist aesthetic. In its entirety, Tanguy's career serves as a crucial link between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

Biography of Yves Tanguy

Yves Tanguy was born into a maritime family. His father was a sea captain, and the family resided at the Ministere de la Marine in the Place de La Concorde. The influences of the seas, skies, and stones of the Finistère coasts in Brittany, where Tanguy spent his childhood summers, manifested in his later works.

His early life was marked by challenges, as his father passed away in 1908, and his brother lost his life in the First World War. While his mother moved to Locronan, Finistère, Tanguy stayed in Paris to complete his education.

During his teenage years, Tanguy formed a friendship with Pierre Matisse, the son of Henri Matisse, whose encouragement and support played an important role in Tanguy's artistic career. From 1918 to 1919, Tanguy worked on cargo boats between South America and Africa due to familial expectations for him to join the Merchant Navy. In 1920, he was conscripted into the French Army in Tunis, where he crossed paths with the poet Jacques Prévert. Prévert found delight in Tanguy's eccentricities and strange habits, such as chewing his socks and consuming live spiders, the latter becoming a recurring party trick for Tanguy.

Released from the army and disillusioned with convention, the artist, along with Prévert, embraced a bohemian lifestyle in Montparnasse. They resided at 54 rue du Château with the writer Marcel Duhamel, transforming it into an informal hub for artists and writers.

This aimless phase of his life came to a halt in 1923 when a serendipitous encounter altered his path. Passing by a Paris gallery window, Tanguy encountered de Chirico's "Le Cerveau de L'enfant," an electrifying experience that inspired him to become a painter. Early influences on the young Tanguy also included Renaissance masters Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach, and Paolo Uccello, whose luminous color and perspective he aimed to emulate.

In 1924, Tanguy was introduced to André Breton and attended the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925. From then on, the artist became a fervent believer, characterized by his distinctive blue eyes and proto-punk hairstyle, earning him the title of a Surrealist mascot. A loyal member of the Surrealist movement, Tanguy contributed to manifestos, magazines, and exhibitions. His 1927 solo exhibition received praise for skillful distortions, serving as the quintessential Surrealist expression and reflecting the movement's inherent mistrust of reality.

The Surrealist aim was confrontation, and Tanguy faced violent reactions to his early works, exhibited in the 1930 Paris screening of Dalí and Buñuel's "L'Âge d'Or." The film's controversial content led to a riot, resulting in three of Tanguy's paintings being slashed. Undeterred, the artist maintained his love for cinema, inspiring its ability to capture motion. He also illustrated Surrealist literary works, such as Louis Aragon's "La Grande Gaîté" (1929) and Paul Eluard's "La Vie Immediate" (1932). Remaining loyal to Breton, Tanguy signed the second Surrealist Manifesto in 1930 and participated in the collective letter in 1934 that expelled Dalí from the group due to his pro-Hitler comments.

By the mid-1930s, Tanguy had attained both fame and wealth, expanding his reputation through exhibitions in Paris, Belgium, England, New York, Tenerife, and the Guggenheim Jeune. However, the artist regarded prestige and money as insignificant, even objectionable. During intoxicated nights in Paris, friends saw him roll banknotes into balls and playfully toss them at surprised café patrons. Despite his financial success, he expressed confusion about money, once confiding to Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a passionate affair, that he wished he hadn't acquired so much of it all at once.

The artist's romantic involvement with Guggenheim ended when he met his future wife, surrealist painter Kay Sage. In 1939, he and Sage relocated to America for painting and travel, ultimately marrying in Reno, Nevada, in 1940.

In America, Tanguy's artistic approach retained its resistance to reality, yet he introduced vibrant reds and yellows to complement the chalky greys, drawing inspiration from the American landscape. Additionally, his textures evolved from bone and rock to include cloth, wood, resin, and plastic.

In 1942, Tanguy's painting "Time and Again" was showcased in Matisse's renowned "Artists en Exil" exhibition. His iconic reputation continued to ascend with exhibitions from 1943 to 1945 at Pierre Matisse's Gallery and a joint exhibition alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of the Century in 1944.

Settling in Woodbury, Connecticut, Sage and Tanguy painted daily and reviewed each other's work. The influence of Sage's larger geometric forms became evident in Tanguy's compositions. Departing from pure automatism, the artist began sketching his compositions beforehand.

Tensions escalated in his relationship with Breton, who, known for excommunicating Surrealists with whom he was unhappy, resented Tanguy's fame and what he perceived as an insufficiently unconscious approach to work. Eventually, Breton labeled Tanguy as 'bourgeois' and demanded that Pierre Matisse sever ties with him. This led to a furious reaction from Tanguy, and the mutual enmity endured for years.

As an American citizen, Tanguy extensively traveled the American West, making regular visits to the Arizona home of fellow surrealists-in-exile Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. The grand scale of the red rocks, the intense brilliance of the sun, and the dramatic presence of Ernst's monumental cement and metal sculptures served as profound inspiration for Tanguy. During this period, the Southwest's environment and the realities of machine-age America left an imprint on his work, evident in the mechanical, angular, and metallic forms.

In 1953, the artist returned to Europe for the first time since 1939, holding exhibitions in Rome, Milan, and Paris. Before returning to America, he visited his sister and the cherished coasts of Brittany.

In 1954, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut organized a joint exhibition of Tanguy and Sage's work. Despite their collaborative working practices, they sought artistic independence, insisting that their pieces be displayed in separate galleries.

Towards the end of his life, friends portrayed Tanguy as a loner, although he still relished Surrealist games. Shortly before his sudden death in 1955, the artist starred in Richter's art movie "8x8," where chess served as a metaphor for transformation. Duchamp played the White King, Jacqueline Matisse the White Queen, and Tanguy the Black Knight. 

The months leading up to his death were remarkably prolific, with Tanguy's robust final canvases seen as the culmination of his life's obsessions. These works elevated his fantastical projections to new heights, consolidating the subjects, objects, colors, and themes of his life into powerful statements such as "Multiplication of the Arcs" (1954) and "Imaginary Numbers" (1954). His ashes were scattered in Brittany, and in September 1955, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted the first major retrospective of Yves Tanguy's work.

Yves Tanguy's Art Style

Yves Tanguy painted a hyper-real world with meticulous precision. His landscapes, a dynamic fusion of reality and fantasy, garnered attention from prominent artists and thinkers, including Salvador Dalí and Mark Rothko. Even Carl Gustav Jung utilized a Tanguy canvas to illustrate his collective unconscious theory.

His objects, depicted with naturalism, float midair or drift toward the sky. Skillful manipulations of scale and perspective and keen observations of the natural world contribute to the hallucinatory effect in his scenes. His peculiar rock formations likely drew inspiration from the Brittany terrain where his mother resided. 

Tanguy's symbolism is deeply personal, reflecting his fixation on childhood memories, dreams, hallucinations, and psychotic episodes. Resisting explicit interpretation, it evokes a range of associations that captivate the viewer's imagination and emotions. Like other Surrealists, Yves Tanguy delved into dreams and the unconscious, but what distinguished him was the naturalistic precision with which he portrayed the mind and its contents. This precision was his crucial contribution. More vividly than any artist before him, Tanguy envisioned and depicted the unconscious as a tangible place