Yves Tanguy

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).