Yves Tanguy The Furniture of Time 1939 Art Style

"I cannot, nor, consequently, want to try to requite a definition, even a simple one, to what I paint. If I did try, I would take a chance very much closing myself in a definition that would afterwards get like a prison for me."

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"I believe at that place is footling to gain past exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. Very much alone in my work, I am nigh jealous of information technology. Geography has no bearing on information technology, not have the interests of the customs in which I work."

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"I plant that if I planned a moving-picture show beforehand, it never surprised me, and surprises are my pleasure in painting."

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"What is Surrealism? It is Yves Tanguy, crowned with the large emerald bird of Paradise."

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"From the ends of the world to the twilight of today/Nothing can withstand my desolate images."

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"The painter of a terrible grace, in the air, beneath the basis and on the bounding main."

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"Peradventure the only true surrealist - about similar a medium."

Summary of Yves Tanguy

Yves Tanguy was in many respects the quintessential Surrealist. A sociable eccentric who ate spiders as a party play a joke on, and a close friend of Andre Breton, Tanguy was all-time-known for his misshapen rocks and molten surfaces that lent definition to the Surrealist aesthetic. Self-taught but enormously skilled, Tanguy painted a hyper-real world with exacting precision. His landscapes, a high-octane blend of fact and fiction, captured the attending of important artists and thinkers from Salvador Dalí to Marker Rothko who admitted their debt to the older artist. And even Carl Gustav Jung used a canvas by Tanguy to illustrate his theory of the commonage unconscious.

Accomplishments

• Tanguy's symbolism is personal, reflecting his obsession with childhood memory, dreams, hallucinations and psychotic episodes. It defies explicit interpretation, and evokes a range of associations that engage the viewer's imagination and emotions.
• Tanguy's landscapes strike a residual betwixt realism and fantasy. Naturalistically-depicted objects hover in midair, or migrate toward the sky. Masterful manipulations of calibration and perspective, and cracking observations of the natural world contribute to the hallucinatory effect of his scenes. His bizarre rock formations were nearly probable inspired by the terrain of Brittany, where his mother lived.
• Like other Surrealists, Tanguy was preoccupied with dreams and the unconscious. What set up him apart was the naturalistic precision with which he depicted the mind and its contents. This was his key contribution. More vividly than whatsoever artist before him, Tanguy imagined and depicted the unconscious as a place.

Biography of Yves Tanguy

Tanguy was built-in into a maritime family unit. His father was a sea helm and the family lived at the Ministere de la Marine in the Place de La Concorde. The seas, skies and stones of the Finistère coasts in Brittany, where Tanguy spent his summers equally a child, appear in his mature work. His early life dealt him some difficult blows - his father died in 1908 and his brother died in the First Globe War. His mother moved to Locronan, Finistère, but Tanguy stayed in Paris to complete his teaching. As a teenager, Tanguy was lucky enough to make friends with Pierre Matisse (son of Henri Matisse) whose encouragement and support would be crucial to his artistic career, which did non begin immediately. His family expected him to join the Merchant Navy and so he did, working on cargo boats between S America and Africa from 1918-1919. In 1920 he was conscripted into the French Army in Tunis, where he met the poet Jacques Prévert who delighted in Tanguy'due south eccentricity and strange habits - from chewing his socks to eating alive spiders. The latter became a party fob that he would oft repeat.

Important Art by Yves Tanguy

Progression of Fine art

1927

Mama, Papa is Wounded!

The vast space, wan palette, and unearthly light in this picture show evoke a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Airborne objects cast nighttime shadows, echoing the work of the before Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. The cactus-similar shape tethered to a geometric spider-web, and floating near the horizon, seems neither captive nor fully free. Typical of the relationship between words and images in Surrealism, the title complicates rather than clarifies the pregnant of the work. With Breton (who, as a war medic, had used Sigmund Freud's methods to treat psychologically damaged soldiers) Tanguy combed psychiatric case studies of patients whose statements could be used every bit ideas for pictures and titles. According to Tanguy, Mama, Papa is Wounded! was among them. Various interpretations of this film have been suggested. For example, that information technology references the violence of World War I and expressed the mood of heightened anxiety that followed. Or that the continuing xanthous figure may stand for a father, the cactus a mother, and the baggy mass a child. The piece of work remains enigmatic, however, refusing to reveal its secrets, and reflecting the intentional ambiguity of Surrealist symbolism.

Oil on canvass - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1929

Noyer Indifférent

This painting'due south fascinating provenance illustrates the reciprocal interplay between surrealism and psychoanalysis. Carl Jung, Freud'due south protégé and an of import influence on the Surrealists, purchased this work in 1929, when Tanguy was near unknown. Jung kept information technology in his study, where it influenced (and peradventure even helped inspire) his theory of the commonage unconscious in 1958. Against total darkness, four biomorphic forms surroundings a central cobweb shape and seem to levitate, casting shadows. Are these animals? Smoke? Fungi? Plastic? The faint horizontal bands stretching beyond the canvas create an ambiguous nocturnal atmosphere Tanguy'southward genius, perfectly summed up past Jung, was a "minimum of intelligibility with a maximum of abstraction." Jung interpreted the picture show as an unconscious commonage fantasy of the technological historic period, showing information technology to as many people as possible to examination their interpretations. They saw bombs, distant planets, underwater creatures and cities lit up at nighttime. Jung saw in the artist's dour horizons a "catholic inhumanness and infinite desolation" that triggered the viewer's unconscious. He concluded that the picture was an archetypal sign of the heavens, linking information technology to recent extraterrestrial phenomena. The feeling of empty stillness this piece of work provokes was observed by Paul Eluard, in his poem, dedicated to Tanguy, with the post-obit words: "From the ends of the earth to the twilight of today/Nothing can withstand my desolate images".

Oil on canvas - Privately owned

1942

Indefinite Divisibility

From the bowls collecting water to the anthropomorphic shadow bandage by the class beside information technology, a jumble of conflicting shapes confronts the viewer, vying for our attention. Dreams and realities merge in objects such every bit a pedal, a propeller, and a clamp. These are iii-dimensional objects nigh to topple to the ground. Tanguy's intention is to express, not to communicate - to trigger sensations, not to explain. Tanguy relied upon his subconscious to supply him with ideas for paintings: "the painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as information technology progresses." What is reality and what is shadow? For Freud, the heightened feet created by his use of depaysement (the state of disorientation experienced in dreams) was a form of psychosis, delusions and illusions. For Tanguy, it was a source of power. Surrealists celebrated madness equally both an inspiration and liberation, equally Breton said in dreams you could: "kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content." In 1950 the Psychological Institute of Vienna displayed Tanguy's paintings abreast those of schizophrenic patients to see if the public could distinguish between the two. They could non (a result that delighted the Surrealists). Breton believed that 1 day Tanguy'southward images "will be made articulate with a language which is not yet understood only which people are shortly going to read, which they are going to talk, and which they are going to perceive is best adapted to the new changes."

Oil on sheet - Albright - Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

1943

Through Birds, Through Fire, But Non Through Glass

Rock-like forms and a strange tower of balloon-shapes, wheel-spokes and stones inhabit this overcast dreamscape. The objects are solid, still the blended form seems to be in transition. Is it molten or frozen? The palette of peppery reds and icy greys makes it incommunicable to tell. Joined in the illogic of the unconscious, these imposing forms cast shadows, imparting farther mystery. There must exist a lord's day backside them. It is possible that these forms were inspired by the Surrealist technique of Coulage - sculpture generated past pouring molten metal into water, generating baggy blobs that evoked associations, somewhat similar a Rorschach examination. With one pes in fantasy, and one in reality, Tanguy, according to Andre Breton, "condensed ... a few pure elements of matter, meeting together and glowing suddenly like particles of dust dancing in a sunbeam." This otherworldly surroundings and its unknowable bailiwick reflects a general involvement amid the Surrealists in mystery, ambiguity and transformation. For the Surrealists, the private self and the external world are in a constant state of flux.

Oil on canvas - Minneapolis Found of Arts

1950

Rose of the 4 Winds

In this belatedly canvas, a tower of hard architecture, built from clusters of sharp, spiky objects dominates a steely grayness and majestic sky. The ground is covered with forbidding rubble (in 1955, the MOMA exhibition called a 'incoherent congestion of boulders, pebbles and basic'). The interplay amid these elements (the looming belfry, threatening heaven, and depression heaps of pebbles) is forbidding, bordering on the apocalyptic, and the stuff of nightmares rather than dreams. Reminiscent of bombed-out cities (war was never far from Tanguy's mind) these bleak aeriform views are typical of the artist'south tardily period. These often include sharper, not-organic and apparently mechanical elements, piling up and stabbing into vast skies (as found in works like From Pale Easily to Weary Skies (1950) and The Hunted Sky (1951)). Afterward the flop tests and the horror of Hiroshima, Tanguy, a sensitive observer, continued to evolve in relation to his environment and other artists. The affect of his wife Sage's larger, geometric forms is visible here, as is the vastness of the American mural. Tanguy's admiration for the work of the younger American artist, Frederick Sommer, who photographed bones in the desert, is likewise visible here. I further influence, no uncertainty, is also present: in the garden at Sedona, Tanguy'southward friend Ernst had built a vast metallic and cement sculpture named Capricorn. The tower hither is reminiscent of this awe-inspiring sculpture sitting under the bleak open up skies.

Oil on canvass - Wadsworth Atheneum

1954

Multiplication of the Arcs

Tanguy completed this large work in the months before his death - while working eight to nine hours a twenty-four hours in deep concentration. It is a familiar subject, one that the creative person revisited in sail later on canvas since the 1920s: a dreamscape under a tempest-threatened sky. Here, however, in that location are no towers, sculptural forms or airborne objects. Nothing rises above the horizon. Everything is tumbled and cleaved. Towers have crumbled into the ground. The broken belfry, as Tanguy well knew, is a powerful sign, an archetypal sign of castration and death in psychoanalytic terms. Whereas Mama, Papa is Wounded! evokes a jarring claustrophobia within a vast, empty infinite, this is essentially the opposite: isolation, amidst a oversupply. The artist's posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 positioned this work equally the culmination of Tanguy's piece of work. While the championship'southward reference is, similar all Tanguy's titles, intentionally obscure, arcs were an iconic Surrealist symbol, a symbolic span between the invisible and the visible, fantasy and reality, sleeping and waking.

Oil on sheet - The Museum of Mod Fine art, New York

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Ruth Epstein

"Yves Tanguy Creative person Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Ruth Epstein
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Commencement published on 07 Dec 2015. Updated and modified regularly
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