Lot Essay
To be included in the supplement to the Yves Tanguy Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Foundation.
"After his African voyage, Tanguy usually substituted mineral forms for the vegetal ones used in earlier works. His color became more complex and varied, with extremes of light and dark replacing the relatively even tonality of his previous pictures. At the same time he made more and more frequent use of one his most poetic inventions - the melting of land into sky, one image metamorphosed into another, as in the moving-picture technique known as lap-dissolve. The fixed horizon was now often replaced by a continuous and flowing treatment of space, and in many paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, it is extremely difficult to determine at what point earth becomes sky or whether objects rest on the ground or float aloft. The ambibuity is intensified by changes in the density of the objects themselves, from opaque to translucent to transparent, creating a spatial double entendre" (J.T. Soby, Yves Tanguy, Museum of Modern Art, New York (exhibition catalogue), 1955, pp. 177 & 18.).
"After his African voyage, Tanguy usually substituted mineral forms for the vegetal ones used in earlier works. His color became more complex and varied, with extremes of light and dark replacing the relatively even tonality of his previous pictures. At the same time he made more and more frequent use of one his most poetic inventions - the melting of land into sky, one image metamorphosed into another, as in the moving-picture technique known as lap-dissolve. The fixed horizon was now often replaced by a continuous and flowing treatment of space, and in many paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, it is extremely difficult to determine at what point earth becomes sky or whether objects rest on the ground or float aloft. The ambibuity is intensified by changes in the density of the objects themselves, from opaque to translucent to transparent, creating a spatial double entendre" (J.T. Soby, Yves Tanguy, Museum of Modern Art, New York (exhibition catalogue), 1955, pp. 177 & 18.).