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Lot Essay
‘The element of surprise in the creation of a work of art is, for me, the most important thing,’ Yves Tanguy observed. ‘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’ (‘The Creative Process’ in Art Digest, vol. 28, no. 8, 1954, p. 14). Painted in 1936, Hérédité des qualités acquises is a captivating example of Tanguy’s idiosyncratic process of creation, which centred around a near-automatic technique the artist developed in the late 1920s and then refined throughout the 1930s with increasing precision and attention to minuscule detail. After first delineating a background landscape whose hazy colours and forms would articulate the overall mood of the picture, Tanguy would instinctively begin to populate the canvas with a series of intuitively arrived-at, amorphous forms. As he worked, each element would both lead to and suggest another, until an entire, mysterious world emerged on his canvas.
As a way to encourage and focus this medium-like method of creation, Tanguy embarked upon a new and more methodical way of painting in 1935. Working solely on one picture at a time, he began to paint in a dedicated room that he had emptied of all furnishings and objects, save for his easel and painting tools. Nothing else was allowed to enter this sacred space or disrupt the artist’s concentration as his unique forms slowly made themselves visible on his canvas. In this way, Tanguy felt, all of his energy, intuition and creative imagination could best be brought into sharper focus, allowing him to discover subtle variations and pursue delicate evolutions of form, as he followed his meandering train of thought. As a result of this shift in practice, Tanguy’s compositions reached a deeper and more profound sense of mystery through the ensuing years, marrying a brighter, more intense colour palette with increasingly complex groupings of elements across the picture plane.
In Hérédité des qualités acquises, a single element stands taller than the other forms within the landscape, stretching upwards like a sinuous ribbon of colour, its rich violet-pink hue allowing it to stand-out within the scene. The inherent fluidity and suppleness of this form is counterbalanced by the surrounding clusters of short, weighty grey shards and rounded blocks, their edges smoothed and shorn into intriguing shapes that recall rocks, stones and shells worn by the force of the elements. To the left of the composition, a wisp-like apparition streams into the air above a cluster of these forms, its gossamer, diaphanous materiality lending it an air of ephemerality. It was the spontaneity and intangibility of Tanguy’s elements, at once vaguely familiar and strangely alien, that intrigued the Surrealists – as André Breton noted, ‘Before Tanguy, the object, despite the occasional exterior attacks to which it was subjected, remained, in the final analysis, distinct and imprisoned within its own identity. With Tanguy we enter for the first time into a world of total latency… The tide ebbs, revealing an endless shore where hitherto unknown composite shapes, creep, rear up, straddle the sand, sometimes sinking below the surface or soaring into the sky. They have no immediate equivalent in nature and it must be said that they have not as yet given rise to any valid interpretation’ (‘Yves Tanguy’ in A. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, London, 1965, pp. 178-179).
As a way to encourage and focus this medium-like method of creation, Tanguy embarked upon a new and more methodical way of painting in 1935. Working solely on one picture at a time, he began to paint in a dedicated room that he had emptied of all furnishings and objects, save for his easel and painting tools. Nothing else was allowed to enter this sacred space or disrupt the artist’s concentration as his unique forms slowly made themselves visible on his canvas. In this way, Tanguy felt, all of his energy, intuition and creative imagination could best be brought into sharper focus, allowing him to discover subtle variations and pursue delicate evolutions of form, as he followed his meandering train of thought. As a result of this shift in practice, Tanguy’s compositions reached a deeper and more profound sense of mystery through the ensuing years, marrying a brighter, more intense colour palette with increasingly complex groupings of elements across the picture plane.
In Hérédité des qualités acquises, a single element stands taller than the other forms within the landscape, stretching upwards like a sinuous ribbon of colour, its rich violet-pink hue allowing it to stand-out within the scene. The inherent fluidity and suppleness of this form is counterbalanced by the surrounding clusters of short, weighty grey shards and rounded blocks, their edges smoothed and shorn into intriguing shapes that recall rocks, stones and shells worn by the force of the elements. To the left of the composition, a wisp-like apparition streams into the air above a cluster of these forms, its gossamer, diaphanous materiality lending it an air of ephemerality. It was the spontaneity and intangibility of Tanguy’s elements, at once vaguely familiar and strangely alien, that intrigued the Surrealists – as André Breton noted, ‘Before Tanguy, the object, despite the occasional exterior attacks to which it was subjected, remained, in the final analysis, distinct and imprisoned within its own identity. With Tanguy we enter for the first time into a world of total latency… The tide ebbs, revealing an endless shore where hitherto unknown composite shapes, creep, rear up, straddle the sand, sometimes sinking below the surface or soaring into the sky. They have no immediate equivalent in nature and it must be said that they have not as yet given rise to any valid interpretation’ (‘Yves Tanguy’ in A. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, London, 1965, pp. 178-179).