Yves Tanguy was a Surrealist painter, born in Paris, France on January 5, 1900. He was persuaded to become an artist after viewing paintings by Giorgio de Chirico (in particular, "The Child's Brain", which he had viewed from the street in the window of a gallery). His associations with the French poet Jacques Prévert and writer Marcel Duhamel were his inspiration to join the Surrealist group headed by André Breton.
This is one of Tanguy's best known paintings, "Indefinite Divisibility", from the year 1942:
The clear, bright air lends a disturbing quality in illuminating this bizarre arrangement of colorful forms. The horizon disappears into an infinite mist. Such landscapes resembling beaches may have been partly inspired from Tanguy's time spent in the Merchant Navy. Tanguy eagerly practiced "automatism", a favored Surrealist technique of painting and creating without conscious interference of any kind. For me, "Indefinite Divisibility" was one of the first paintings to open up the larger world of Surrealism, outside of my initial sole interest in Salvador Dali.
Tanguy, like many Modern artists, left Europe during World War II, settling in the United States.
I know Reno, Nevada for two things. One is the sleepless night that I spent there, after arriving early one morning for a business trip. The other is that it's the place where Yves Tanguy married the artist Kay Sage. Not that I was there for that occasion, or even in existence, in 1940. (See post dated 4-6-2011 for more about Sage, also one of my favorite Surrealists). Eventually Tanguy and Sage moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, where they continued to paint and embrace the American life, declining to return to France even after World War II ended.
Tanguy died of a stroke on Jan. 15, 1955, at only 55 years of age. Sage spent the subsequent years promoting and cataloguing her husband's works (in spite of failing eyesight) before taking her own life in 1963.
You can see Tanguy's really cool hairstyle and more, at www.yvestanguy.org/en/
(This website includes an interesting biography on Tanguy, broken up into different years. There's also a photo of a very young Kay Sage, a picture which Tanguy apparently carried with him constantly).
One of the favorite games played by artists of André Breton's Surrealist group, was that of "Exquisite Corpse". A means of deriving fresh and startling images from unconscious thought and no premade plans, the game was played by one artist beginning a drawing at the upper portion of a piece of paper, folding the drawing from view, and then having another artist continue the drawing from where the original left off, not knowing what the previous artist had drawn. Often, three or four artists would be involved in one drawing. Here is one such drawing (Exquisite Corpse No. 10, year 1928), created by Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, and André Breton (image property of the Art Institute of Chicago):
I suppose that the lower portion of the drawing, by Breton, might have been inspired by the statues and pedestals seen in paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. I would have loved to have participated in one of these drawing sessions with the Surrealists, as I'm sure they took great delight in the finished drawings. I'll have to find someone willing to play this game with me! :)
Here's a contemporary artist that I just discovered... Benedict Oddi, of Pittsburgh, PA. His website can be reached here! In particular I enjoy the paintings listed under his "Eternal Escape Unknown" heading. These paintings are of a surrealist nature, and we can see the possible influence of several different artists here. Primarily Oddi's works are reminiscent of Yves Tanguy, except that they contain more lurid color. His painting "F Your Sailboat" also reminds me of a Roberto Matta work, with its possible depiction of the landscape of the mind. The bird figure in "Flight of Icarus" is suggestive of the same expressionless animal seen in several of Salvador Dali's paintings, such as "Little Ashes", in combination with Dali's frequent self portrait in which he paints himself face downwards and with a distinctive nose, as in The Great Masturbator. Also the bird seems to be evocative of the figures found in Joan Miro's famous painting "Dog Barking at the Moon", with the primarily white body marked by splashes of color. Anyway, lots of influences here! Or so it seems to me. If I get out to the Pittsburgh area one day, I wouldn't mind looking up this artist and maybe catching an available show.
In my recent salivating attention to the artist Dorothea Tanning, I may have neglected to give proper attention to another one of my favorite surrealist painters, Kay Sage. Sage's paintings are reminiscent of those of Girogio de Chirico, with their hauntingly simple and seemingly unfinished manmade architecture, and far off horizons deep with despair. I would credit Kay Sage as one of the original inspirations for my attraction to surrealist art. Her painting "In the Third Sleep" is the influence for a painting idea which I've had in my head for many years, but have never created (I think because it is just TOO similar to Sage's painting and needs work!). There's something romantic about sitting in a musty old library, looking through worn books covering the lives of such special artists as Kay Sage. It makes me wonder why I couldn't have lived in her world and time.
Kay Sage was married to the surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, and was a good friend of Dorothea Tanning (I'll surely write more about Tanguy in a future post). Like Tanning, Sage used subdued colors in her paintings, which I think gave her work a wonderful "aged" look. Her colors have a creamy and smooth gradation, reminding me of something which might be edible. Kay struggled for any recognition of her talent, and even her husband Yves was apparently prone to belittling her (if you've ever seen Yves' haircut, you might question how he could poke fun at someone else). Sage struggled with depression and failing eyesight after her husband died of a stroke in 1955.
Kay Sage died in 1963, from a self-inflicted gunshot to the heart. It's disturbing to know that someone so talented and immersed in a world loved by many, could be persuaded to end her life. It's tempting when looking at the tragic lives of artists such as Kay Sage, Arshile Gorky and Frida Kahlo, to wonder what might have been, if events hadn't cut them down so wrongly. But then, isn't it silly to expect more than we have been given by these artists already? Did not these artists achieve greatness regardless of obstacles? In the same way that it took the immensity and chaos of the universe in order to create the unique Earth, so too were the trials and heartbreak in the lives of our favorite artists, the necessary catalysts of the works that we appreciate. There could be no more great paintings. The artists did what they could, and all that was really necessary, and then they were gone.
Some more of Sage's paintings can be seen here.
