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Lot Essay
Early in 1930 Tanguy and his wife Jeanette visited North Africa where Tanguy became deeply impressed by the high plateaux and table mountains of the Atlas. On his return his impressions of Africa clearly entered his painting for a brief period and he produced a small series of works that seemed to blend the austerity of the Atlas mountains into a strange fluid architecture of amorphous form. Second Message III is an exceptional work from this period that reflects some of these new influences, but which, in the main, remains closer to his darker, more mysterious and often psychically inspired early paintings of 1928 and 1929.
The lightness of the atmosphere and the sharp and clear delineation of the various amorphous forms in Second Message III clearly mark a new departure from Tanguy's rather smoky or cloudy paintings of the late '20s - the fumées as André Breton called them. This new clarity in the paintings Tanguy produced on his return from North Africa probably reflects an effect which he had witnessed in the mountains there, where the rarified desert mountain air causes an absence of aerial perspective that allows very distant objects to appear relatively near. As Tanguy discovered, the absence of aerial perspective when applied to his work generates a strange sense of supernatural lighting that immediately lent his work a new otherworldly feel. Instead of seeming to be murky undersea landscapes, Tanguy's paintings now seemed like dreamscapes from another planet reproduced in almost photographic clarity.
Although this precision in the painterly style of Second Message III resembles the new hallucinatory clarity of Tanguy's rock formation paintings to which Breton gave the name coulées, the subject matter of this painting is wholly different. As its English title suggests, Second Message III presents a scene that seems to describe the physical manifestation of some strange psychic phenomena, as if it were the product of some unknown pictographic language. From 1927 Tanguy had used the "guided chance" principle of selection in the choice of the titles of his work. With the assistance of Breton, Tanguy had applied striking phrases from Charles Richet's 1922 Traité de metapsychique to help generate an aura of otherworldliness around his work and to hint at the parapsychological manner of their creation. Tanguy used a painstaking automatism in the creation of his imagery that he believed allowed all the parapsychological forces of the unconscious to come into play. At its simplest it was a method that encouraged the creation of the new. "I found that if I planned a picture beforehand, it never surprised me," Tanguy once observed, "and surprises are pleasure in painting." At the same time, Tanguy's automatism also opened his paintings up to an additional interpretative dimension, hinting, with the help of mysterious titles such as those gleaned from phrases in Richet's book, of a wider and more complex relationship with other worlds.
Tanguy's first solo exhibition at the Galerie Surréaliste in May 1927, was described as being a series of "messages" as if from other worlds and the title Second Message undoubtedly refers to a similar sense of message. Second Message III is the third painting with this title, the first, now lost, was painted in 1926 and was one of a small series of black landscapes which Tanguy made in this year. It depicted a stormy undersea-like landscape with tumbling humanoid forms and a sharp vertical stalagmite-like form on the right of the painting. Second Message II of 1927, (which may also, rather confusingly have been called Troisième Message (Third Message) in the Galerie Surréaliste catalogue), seems to have its origins in the idea of spiritual mediums being able to transmit messages from one spiritual world to another, and shows a series of aerial spirits crossing the horizon line from one realm to the next and plunging headfirst into a cloudy sea. The right of the painting is again dominated by a volcano-like stalagmite while other turbulent and seemingly explosive events seem to be taking place in both above and below. Second Message III is far less turbulent than either of its predecessors, the seemingly fluid surface of the lower half of the painting seems to have almost solidified while the calm cream skies of the infinite background generates a magical aura of otherworldliness. The dramatic events of the other two paintings are here reduced to glyph-like forms that seem to punctuate rather than disturb the landscape. The only hint that any mysterious activity is taking place is the display of wisps of white darting above the horizon line like the aurora borealis. These wisps of white bear a resemblance to other cloudlike emanations that appear in Tanguy's work and again perhaps have their origin in the artist's interest in psychic phenomena. In his treatise on "metapsychics" Richet detailed accounts of "ectoplasmic materialisations" which were often seen to emanate from the bodies of mediums when they bore psychic messages from the beyond. These he described as "always skeins of white mist, milky patches, and before long, faces or fingers take shape within this gelatinous paste, a kind of moist and sticky foam." The metamorphic activity that seems to be taking place in both the upper and lower portions of Second Message III seems to lend itself to such a description of the materialisation of the spirit and in this respect may have prompted Tanguy's decision to title this work for the third, and last time, as a portrait of a such "message" from another world.
The lightness of the atmosphere and the sharp and clear delineation of the various amorphous forms in Second Message III clearly mark a new departure from Tanguy's rather smoky or cloudy paintings of the late '20s - the fumées as André Breton called them. This new clarity in the paintings Tanguy produced on his return from North Africa probably reflects an effect which he had witnessed in the mountains there, where the rarified desert mountain air causes an absence of aerial perspective that allows very distant objects to appear relatively near. As Tanguy discovered, the absence of aerial perspective when applied to his work generates a strange sense of supernatural lighting that immediately lent his work a new otherworldly feel. Instead of seeming to be murky undersea landscapes, Tanguy's paintings now seemed like dreamscapes from another planet reproduced in almost photographic clarity.
Although this precision in the painterly style of Second Message III resembles the new hallucinatory clarity of Tanguy's rock formation paintings to which Breton gave the name coulées, the subject matter of this painting is wholly different. As its English title suggests, Second Message III presents a scene that seems to describe the physical manifestation of some strange psychic phenomena, as if it were the product of some unknown pictographic language. From 1927 Tanguy had used the "guided chance" principle of selection in the choice of the titles of his work. With the assistance of Breton, Tanguy had applied striking phrases from Charles Richet's 1922 Traité de metapsychique to help generate an aura of otherworldliness around his work and to hint at the parapsychological manner of their creation. Tanguy used a painstaking automatism in the creation of his imagery that he believed allowed all the parapsychological forces of the unconscious to come into play. At its simplest it was a method that encouraged the creation of the new. "I found that if I planned a picture beforehand, it never surprised me," Tanguy once observed, "and surprises are pleasure in painting." At the same time, Tanguy's automatism also opened his paintings up to an additional interpretative dimension, hinting, with the help of mysterious titles such as those gleaned from phrases in Richet's book, of a wider and more complex relationship with other worlds.
Tanguy's first solo exhibition at the Galerie Surréaliste in May 1927, was described as being a series of "messages" as if from other worlds and the title Second Message undoubtedly refers to a similar sense of message. Second Message III is the third painting with this title, the first, now lost, was painted in 1926 and was one of a small series of black landscapes which Tanguy made in this year. It depicted a stormy undersea-like landscape with tumbling humanoid forms and a sharp vertical stalagmite-like form on the right of the painting. Second Message II of 1927, (which may also, rather confusingly have been called Troisième Message (Third Message) in the Galerie Surréaliste catalogue), seems to have its origins in the idea of spiritual mediums being able to transmit messages from one spiritual world to another, and shows a series of aerial spirits crossing the horizon line from one realm to the next and plunging headfirst into a cloudy sea. The right of the painting is again dominated by a volcano-like stalagmite while other turbulent and seemingly explosive events seem to be taking place in both above and below. Second Message III is far less turbulent than either of its predecessors, the seemingly fluid surface of the lower half of the painting seems to have almost solidified while the calm cream skies of the infinite background generates a magical aura of otherworldliness. The dramatic events of the other two paintings are here reduced to glyph-like forms that seem to punctuate rather than disturb the landscape. The only hint that any mysterious activity is taking place is the display of wisps of white darting above the horizon line like the aurora borealis. These wisps of white bear a resemblance to other cloudlike emanations that appear in Tanguy's work and again perhaps have their origin in the artist's interest in psychic phenomena. In his treatise on "metapsychics" Richet detailed accounts of "ectoplasmic materialisations" which were often seen to emanate from the bodies of mediums when they bore psychic messages from the beyond. These he described as "always skeins of white mist, milky patches, and before long, faces or fingers take shape within this gelatinous paste, a kind of moist and sticky foam." The metamorphic activity that seems to be taking place in both the upper and lower portions of Second Message III seems to lend itself to such a description of the materialisation of the spirit and in this respect may have prompted Tanguy's decision to title this work for the third, and last time, as a portrait of a such "message" from another world.