.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The Yves Tanguy Committee’s present intention is to include this work in the revised edition of the catalogue raisonné of his paintings and gouaches.
‘The painting grows before my eyes revealing its surprises as it comes together. That’s what gives me a sense of total freedom, and for that reason I am incapable of conceiving a plan or of doing a preliminary sketch’
(Yves Tanguy, quoted in film by Fabrice Maze, Yves Tanguy. Derrière la grille des yeux bleus, 2007).
Painted in 1935, Sans titre is a metaphysical landscape comprised of a sequence of dolmen-like stone-sculptural forms set against a hazy, mysterious and infinite background that slowly fades away into an impenetrable distance. Employed by Tanguy as if they were crystalline figures or stone glyphs belonging to some mysterious and as yet unknown alien language, his strangely organic constructions punctuate a mysterious, endless, empty, desert-like space that, like an undersea world, blurs the division between land and sky. ‘I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window,’ wrote André Breton about Tanguy’s work, ‘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’ (André Breton: Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris, 1928).
In the mid-1930s Tanguy’s evocative but enigmatic and intuitively arrived-at forms often came to be depicted in a sequence of progressive lines that extended horizontally across the foreground of his paintings as if set out in some kind of formal or linguistic sequence. In this work, this sequence has been augmented in places by groupings of thin reed-like lines sprouting like construction poles from behind some of the larger, sharp, stone-like shapes and casting dark, spiny, angular shadows on the desert floor. These are some of the first manifestations of such thin wooden-looking lines that, from this period and for much of the mid-to-late 1930s onwards, would augment and contrast with the more familiar, solid sculptural suggestions of Tanguy’s amorphous pictorial language. Appearing to articulate a different, almost constructivist logic to the artist’s more fluid and arbitrary collations of ambiguous but distinctly organic form, these sticks often instill in Tanguy’s paintings of the mid-1930s, a strange sense of rational order or of reason gone awry.
’The element of surprise in the creation of a work of art is, for me, the most important thing’, Tanguy frequently observed, and it was for this reason that he would work largely automatically once he had first established the landscape-like ground of his picture (Yves Tanguy, ‘The Creative Process’, Art Digest, vol. 28, no. 8, New York, January 1954, p. 14). ‘I found that if I planned a picture beforehand,’ Tanguy once remarked, it never surprised me, and surprises are pleasure in painting’, adding that what interested him most was the way in which the first motif he painted always suggested a second which then suggested a third and a fourth etc. (Yves Tanguy, quoted in Yves Tanguy, exh. cat. New York, 1955, p. 17).
In 1935 Tanguy began for the first time to paint in a single room devoid of any furnishings except his easel. This monastic and meditative approach to the creation of his paintings was one that he would continue for the rest of his life. Nothing else was allowed to enter this sacred empty space and distract the artist while he concentrated on bringing into being the unique world becoming visible on the single canvas set upon his easel. In this way, Tanguy felt, all of his energy, intuition and creative imagination could best be brought into focus on the unique mental landscape he was psychically creating in the heart of this otherwise empty room.
In this painting, two lines of strange organic structures that, in places, are reminiscent of stony forms on the beaches of Brittany where Tanguy had grown up, articulate a bizarre pictorial language of intuitive reasoning. Extending across the foreground of the painting like concrete apparitions that slowly dissolve into the mists of the perspectival distance, they bear, in some instances, a resemblance to the similarly organic/constructivist language of Kurt Schwitters’ sculptures of this same period. Though the similarity is almost certainly coincidental, it is also revealing, for both of these artists worked according to a practice of following unconscious impulses prompted in them by the chance-derived forms and materials they found while wandering through real, or in Tanguy’s case, imaginary landscapes. ‘I expect nothing of my reflections’, Tanguy once said, ‘but I am sure of my reflexes’ (Yves Tanguy quoted in Yves Tanguy, exh. cat. New York, 1955, p. 19).
‘The painting grows before my eyes revealing its surprises as it comes together. That’s what gives me a sense of total freedom, and for that reason I am incapable of conceiving a plan or of doing a preliminary sketch’
(Yves Tanguy, quoted in film by Fabrice Maze, Yves Tanguy. Derrière la grille des yeux bleus, 2007).
Painted in 1935, Sans titre is a metaphysical landscape comprised of a sequence of dolmen-like stone-sculptural forms set against a hazy, mysterious and infinite background that slowly fades away into an impenetrable distance. Employed by Tanguy as if they were crystalline figures or stone glyphs belonging to some mysterious and as yet unknown alien language, his strangely organic constructions punctuate a mysterious, endless, empty, desert-like space that, like an undersea world, blurs the division between land and sky. ‘I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window,’ wrote André Breton about Tanguy’s work, ‘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’ (André Breton: Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris, 1928).
In the mid-1930s Tanguy’s evocative but enigmatic and intuitively arrived-at forms often came to be depicted in a sequence of progressive lines that extended horizontally across the foreground of his paintings as if set out in some kind of formal or linguistic sequence. In this work, this sequence has been augmented in places by groupings of thin reed-like lines sprouting like construction poles from behind some of the larger, sharp, stone-like shapes and casting dark, spiny, angular shadows on the desert floor. These are some of the first manifestations of such thin wooden-looking lines that, from this period and for much of the mid-to-late 1930s onwards, would augment and contrast with the more familiar, solid sculptural suggestions of Tanguy’s amorphous pictorial language. Appearing to articulate a different, almost constructivist logic to the artist’s more fluid and arbitrary collations of ambiguous but distinctly organic form, these sticks often instill in Tanguy’s paintings of the mid-1930s, a strange sense of rational order or of reason gone awry.
’The element of surprise in the creation of a work of art is, for me, the most important thing’, Tanguy frequently observed, and it was for this reason that he would work largely automatically once he had first established the landscape-like ground of his picture (Yves Tanguy, ‘The Creative Process’, Art Digest, vol. 28, no. 8, New York, January 1954, p. 14). ‘I found that if I planned a picture beforehand,’ Tanguy once remarked, it never surprised me, and surprises are pleasure in painting’, adding that what interested him most was the way in which the first motif he painted always suggested a second which then suggested a third and a fourth etc. (Yves Tanguy, quoted in Yves Tanguy, exh. cat. New York, 1955, p. 17).
In 1935 Tanguy began for the first time to paint in a single room devoid of any furnishings except his easel. This monastic and meditative approach to the creation of his paintings was one that he would continue for the rest of his life. Nothing else was allowed to enter this sacred empty space and distract the artist while he concentrated on bringing into being the unique world becoming visible on the single canvas set upon his easel. In this way, Tanguy felt, all of his energy, intuition and creative imagination could best be brought into focus on the unique mental landscape he was psychically creating in the heart of this otherwise empty room.
In this painting, two lines of strange organic structures that, in places, are reminiscent of stony forms on the beaches of Brittany where Tanguy had grown up, articulate a bizarre pictorial language of intuitive reasoning. Extending across the foreground of the painting like concrete apparitions that slowly dissolve into the mists of the perspectival distance, they bear, in some instances, a resemblance to the similarly organic/constructivist language of Kurt Schwitters’ sculptures of this same period. Though the similarity is almost certainly coincidental, it is also revealing, for both of these artists worked according to a practice of following unconscious impulses prompted in them by the chance-derived forms and materials they found while wandering through real, or in Tanguy’s case, imaginary landscapes. ‘I expect nothing of my reflections’, Tanguy once said, ‘but I am sure of my reflexes’ (Yves Tanguy quoted in Yves Tanguy, exh. cat. New York, 1955, p. 19).