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Lot Essay
Andr Breton, high priest of Surrealism, wrote of painting: "I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on..... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight." (Andr Breton, Le Surralisme et la peinture, 1928)
Un grand tableau qui reprsente un paysage (Large Picture representing a Landscape) is one of Tanguy's largest and earliest Surrealist masterpieces. Executed in 1927, this immense otherworldly panorama emphatically marks Tanguy's arrival at the mature style to which he would remain faithful for the rest of his life.
With its dark rippling shadows creating a lilting rhythm to the sandy expanse that stretches towards a distant and barely perceivable horizon and its wispy sprigs of seaweed swaying in an unseen current, Un grand tableau resembles a floating underwater world. Indeed many of Tanguy's paintings from this period evoke the exotic life and mystery of the ocean floor, some even depict fish swimming through the scene, seemingly oblivious to the absence of water.
Tanguy's biomorphic underwater bestiary owes much to the forms of Hans Arp. The dreamy atmosphere is all his own. Tanguy had spent his childhood in Locronan in the far west of Brittany before becoming a cadet in the Merchant Navy. His dreams of adventure and of the marvellous had always revolved around and been inspired by the sea. When he turned to painting it came as no surprise that such evocative imagery should emerge in his art from the depths of his unconscious.
Tanguy was inspired to become a painter and indeed a Surrealist by a chance encounter with a work by Giorgio de Chirico that he saw displayed in a gallery window while travelling past in a bus. So the legend goes, he immediately recognised his own destiny as an artist. The dark rhomboid of Un grand tableau qui reprsente un paysage, with its sinister shadow and anthropomorphic, embryonic figure at its head, clearly recalls de Chirico's metaphysical painting with its melancholy statues and afternoon shadows.
Tanguy arrived at his smooth illusionistic style of painting in a remarkable transformation that coincided with his joining the Surrealist group. Although the very first examples of his new work date from 1926, it was not until 1927 in monumental paintings such as Maman, Papa est bless (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the present work that he established his credentials as one of the foremost painters of the Surrealist group. Though this style and technique was later adopted by Salvador Dal, who transformed Tanguy's sea-bed scenes and soft biomorphic characters into renditions of the beaches around his native Cadaques and claimed the style as his own, Tanguy remained unconcerned. In paintings such as the present work, he conjured a powerful vision of the dark recesses of his mind. He commented, "I expect nothing from my thinking mind. I am sure of my instincts."
Breton himself provided the preface to the catalogue of Tanguy's exhibition in 1927 at the Galerie Surraliste, in which this painting was a highlight. He asks rhetorically: "What do we find in this domain of pure form towards which any meditation upon painting will surely guide us, here where a ball of feathers weighs as much as a ball of lead, where all living things can fly and burrow with ease, where the most hostile elements meet and confront each other without catastrophic results, where we know that a youthful mind will remain for ever youthful, where fire readily kindles on water?" (reproduced in A. Breton, Le Surralisme et la Peinture, 1928)
Un grand tableau qui reprsente un paysage (Large Picture representing a Landscape) is one of Tanguy's largest and earliest Surrealist masterpieces. Executed in 1927, this immense otherworldly panorama emphatically marks Tanguy's arrival at the mature style to which he would remain faithful for the rest of his life.
With its dark rippling shadows creating a lilting rhythm to the sandy expanse that stretches towards a distant and barely perceivable horizon and its wispy sprigs of seaweed swaying in an unseen current, Un grand tableau resembles a floating underwater world. Indeed many of Tanguy's paintings from this period evoke the exotic life and mystery of the ocean floor, some even depict fish swimming through the scene, seemingly oblivious to the absence of water.
Tanguy's biomorphic underwater bestiary owes much to the forms of Hans Arp. The dreamy atmosphere is all his own. Tanguy had spent his childhood in Locronan in the far west of Brittany before becoming a cadet in the Merchant Navy. His dreams of adventure and of the marvellous had always revolved around and been inspired by the sea. When he turned to painting it came as no surprise that such evocative imagery should emerge in his art from the depths of his unconscious.
Tanguy was inspired to become a painter and indeed a Surrealist by a chance encounter with a work by Giorgio de Chirico that he saw displayed in a gallery window while travelling past in a bus. So the legend goes, he immediately recognised his own destiny as an artist. The dark rhomboid of Un grand tableau qui reprsente un paysage, with its sinister shadow and anthropomorphic, embryonic figure at its head, clearly recalls de Chirico's metaphysical painting with its melancholy statues and afternoon shadows.
Tanguy arrived at his smooth illusionistic style of painting in a remarkable transformation that coincided with his joining the Surrealist group. Although the very first examples of his new work date from 1926, it was not until 1927 in monumental paintings such as Maman, Papa est bless (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the present work that he established his credentials as one of the foremost painters of the Surrealist group. Though this style and technique was later adopted by Salvador Dal, who transformed Tanguy's sea-bed scenes and soft biomorphic characters into renditions of the beaches around his native Cadaques and claimed the style as his own, Tanguy remained unconcerned. In paintings such as the present work, he conjured a powerful vision of the dark recesses of his mind. He commented, "I expect nothing from my thinking mind. I am sure of my instincts."
Breton himself provided the preface to the catalogue of Tanguy's exhibition in 1927 at the Galerie Surraliste, in which this painting was a highlight. He asks rhetorically: "What do we find in this domain of pure form towards which any meditation upon painting will surely guide us, here where a ball of feathers weighs as much as a ball of lead, where all living things can fly and burrow with ease, where the most hostile elements meet and confront each other without catastrophic results, where we know that a youthful mind will remain for ever youthful, where fire readily kindles on water?" (reproduced in A. Breton, Le Surralisme et la Peinture, 1928)