Yves Tanguy
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Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy (January 5, 1900 – January 15, 1955) was a surrealist painter. He was born in Paris, France, the son of a retired navy captain. 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, Yves 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. By chance, 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.
Through his friend Jacques Prévert, Tanguy was introduced about 1924 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 later that same year.
Throughout the 1930s, Tanguy adopted the bohemian lifestyle of the struggling artist with gusto, leading eventually to the failure of his first marriage. In 1938, after seeing the work of fellow artist Kay Sage, Tanguy began a relationship with her that would eventually lead 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 January 1955, Tanguy suffered a stroke at Woodbury, and died from it; his body was cremated. Preserved until Sage's death in 1963, his ashes were scattered by his friend Pierre Matisse on the beach at Douarnenez in his beloved Brittany, together with those of his wife.
Yves 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 amoeba suddenly turned to stone.
Selected list of works
- 1925 Rue de la Santé
- 1927 Shadow Country
- 1927 Mama, Papa is wounded!
- 1927 Extinction of Useless lights
- 1929 The Look of Amber
- 1929 L’Avion
- 1930 La Splendeur Semblable
- 1930 Neither Legends Nor Figures
- 1931 Promontory Palace
- 1934 I Await You
- 1935 Echelles
- 1936 L’Extinction des Especes
- 1937 Les Filles des Consequences
- 1937 The Sun in its Jewel Case
- 1939 La Rue aux Levres
- 1940 The Satin Tuning Fork
- 1941 En Lieu de Peur
- 1942 Indefinite Divisibility
- 1942 The Absent Lady
- 1942 The Great Mutation
- 1942 Slowly Toward the North
- 1943 Through Birds, Through Fire and Not Through Glass
- 1943 Reply to Red
- 1943 Zones D’Instabilite
- 1945 The Rapidity of Sleep
- 1946 La Grue des Sebles
- 1946 Hands and Gloves
- 1951 The Invisibles
- 1951 Le Temps Egaux
- 1954 Multiplication of the Arcs
External Links
- Ibiblio.org's (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/) Yves Tanguy Section (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/tanguy/)de:Yves Tanguy