Yves Tanguy was a French artist who represented surrealism. His hallucinatory paintings combined the psychological inner world of a person with precise imagery depicting various bone-like objects in a naturalistic way and were placed in unusual landscapes created due to the masterly use of scale and perspective. One of his most known canvases is ‘Mama, Papa is Wounded!’.
Background
Ethnicity:
Yves Tanguy’s parents came from Brittany, a cultural area in the northwestern France.
Yves Tanguy full-named as Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy was born on January 5, 1900, in Paris, France. He was a son of Felix Tanguy, a sea captain, and Therese Coadou who lived at the Ministere de la Marine in the Place de La Concorde and had one more son.
When Yves was an eight-years-old child, his father died, and his mother returned to her homeland, a Locronan commune in the Finistère department of Brittany. The young boy was raised among the prehistoric menhirs and dolmens which later appeared on his fantastic canvases.
Tanguy also had a sister. His elder brother was killed at the First World War.
Education
Yves Tanguy studied at the Lycée Saint Louis in Paris during the 1910s. While at the lycee, he met one of his future lifelong friends, Pierre Matisse.
As to the painting, Tanguy had no formal training, but developed his artistic skills producing sketches of café scenes.
Following the wish of his marine family, Yves Tanguy joined the Merchant Navy in 1918. For one year, he had travelled between Africa, South America and England on cargo boats. In 1920, Tanguy started his military service in the French Army in Tunis. While in the army, he befriended the poet Jacques Prévert.
Two years later, Yves Tanguy came back to Paris where he collected various jobs to earn his living, including sketching in cafés. One day in 1923, Tanguy saw a painting by the artist Giorgio de Chirico which pushed him to become a painter himself.
The next year, the young man met the poet and author of the Surrealist Manifesto André Breton, who became his lifelong friend and introduced him to this artistic movement. Yves Tanguy quickly adopted the surrealist principles, like the automatism, and became one of its most active members contributing to different manifestos, periodicals and exhibitions.
By the end of the decade, the artist developed his own style. In contrary of other Surrealist painters, Tanguy used completely imagined shapes which not existed in reality. The first solo exhibition of his paintings took place in 1927 at the Surrealist Gallery in Paris and was followed by the group show at the Galerie au Sacré du Printemps the next year.
In addition to his own paintings, the artist illustrated many works of his Surrealist fellows in literature, in particular, the poetry collections ‘La Grande Gaîté’ (‘The Great Gaiety’) by Louis Aragon and ‘La Vie Immediate’ (‘Immediate Life’) by Paul Eluard.
Although some of Tanguy’s early paintings were met with certain distrust, by the 1930s the artist received both popularity and money. During the decade, he took part at many solo shows and group exhibitions of Surrealists organized in New York City, Brussels, Paris, Tenerife, Spain and London, including the first retrospective at the British gallery ‘Guggenheim Jeune’ in 1938.
The following year, Yves Tanguy moved with his beloved Kay Sage to the United States.
While in the country, the artist’s fame continued to grow with the exhibitions at Pierre Matisse’s Gallery, including ‘Artists in Exile’ of 1942, and ‘Art of the Century’ at Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery in 1944.
The painter travelled widely through the country visiting its various regions which peculiarities left their marks on his canvases, like the mechanical, angular, metallic forms on the artworks of 1950s.
In 1953, Yves Tanguy made his first European trip since his departure in 1939. He exhibited in Rome at the Galleria de l'Obelisco, in Milan at the Puis del Naviglio and in Paris at the Galerie Renou & Poyet.
The subsequent year, the artist returned to the United States where he demonstrated his artworks along with his wife Kay Sage at the joint show held in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut.
Shortly before his death, Tanguy performed in the art movie ‘8x8’ by Hans Richter.
During the last months of his life, Yves Tanguy created such artworks as ‘Multiplication of the Arcs’ and ‘Imaginary Numbers’, both of 1954.
Yves Tanguy considered prestige and wealth insignificant.
Quotations:
"I cannot, nor, consequently, want to try to give a definition, even a simple one, to what I paint. If I did try, I would risk very much closing myself in a definition that would later become like a prison for me."
"I found that if I planned a picture beforehand, it never surprised me, and surprises are my pleasure in painting."
"The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand."
"From the ends of the earth to the twilight of today/Nothing can withstand my desolate images."
"I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. Very much alone in my work, I am almost jealous of it. Geography has no bearing on it, not have the interests of the community in which I work."
Personality
Although described by André Breton and Hans Richter as a loner, Yves Tanguy was an eccentric person. One of his star turns was eating the spiders.
He had a fine collection of guns with telescopic sights.
Physical Characteristics:
Yves Tanguy had blue eyes.
Quotes from others about the person
"The painter of a terrible grace, in the air, below the ground and on the sea." André Breton, French writer and poet
"What is Surrealism? It is Yves Tanguy, crowned with the big emerald bird of Paradise." André Breton, French writer and poet
"Perhaps the only true surrealist – almost like a medium." Kay Sage, American artist and poet
Interests
cinema
Artists
Giorgio de Chirico, Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach, Paulo Uccello
Connections
Yves Tanguy was married twice. His first wife became Jeannette Ducrocq in 1927.
At the end of the next decade, the artist had a love affair with Peggy Guggenheim. The romantic relationship ended when Tanguy met his second wife, the artist Kay Sage. Kay and Yves started a family on August 17, 1940, in Reno, Nevada, United States.
Yves Tanguy and Surrealism
Containing the stunning reproductions of the artist's paintings in full color as well as black and white, the book is an extensive overview of Yves Tanguy's work whose forays into the creative unknown continue to resonate
2001
Yves Tanguy & Alexander Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction
In the volume, full of color reproductions and important ephemera relating to shared history of Yves Tanguy and Alexander Calder, Susan Davidson, Senior Curator of collections and exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, elucidates the overlap between these two canonical modernists