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Artist or Maker: YVES TANGUY (1900-1955)

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Dimensions: 28 3/4 by 23 5/8in. 73 by 60cm

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Provenance: Property from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Jerome H. Hirschmann
M. Rohland
M and Mme James Ducellier, Carcassonne (before 1963)
Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago
Acquired from the above circa 1960

Exhibited:
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Dada and Surrealism in Chicago Collections, 1985 (titled Untitled)

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Notes: Literature:
Pierre Matisse, Yves Tanguy: Un Recueil de ses Oeuvres, New York, 1963, no. 194, illustrated p. 101
Patrick Waldberg, Yves Tanguy, Brussels, 1977, illustrated p. 172
J.H. Matthews, Eight Painters, The Surrealist Context, Syracuse, 1982, illustrated

Les filles des conséquences is one of Tanguy's biomorphic landscapes, painted at the end of the artist's involvement with the Surrealist group. Tanguy's career as a painter began in 1922 shortly after the artist saw, through the window of a Paris bus, an early Surrealist work by Giorgio de Chirico at Paul Guillaume's gallery. The impact of de Chirico's metaphysical landscapes was so great that Tanguy joined the Surrealist group in 1925, collaborating with André Breton in La Révolution Surréaliste. Though few of Tanguy's early works survive, those that do clearly allude to de Chirico's ``Italian squares'' of the same period. It was not until 1927 that Tanguy began painting the dream-like landscapes which would establish him as a major figure of the Surrealist School. By the time he painted the present work in 1937, the artist had well established himself as an important member of the avant-garde. His pictures from these years would later attract the attention of significant collectors and dealers in the United States who likened these landscapes to the rugged, barren beauty of the American west.

The present work contains many of the distinctive elements which characterize the artist's signature ``mind-scapes'': the deep foreground plain and ambiguous horizon, the presence of objects set against a silent backdrop as well as the strange, biomorphic forms which may refer to the prehistoric monoliths and dolmens of the Brittany landscape that Tanguy knew as a child. Many of his landscapes of the 1930s were greatly influenced also by his trip to Africa in 1930-31, and the desert rock formations and mineral shapes clearly reflect his fascination with the aesthetic of the continent. Describing Tanguy's work from this period, his dealer Pierre Matisse once wrote, ``There is a great simplicity and sincerity in Tanguy's work which [is] due to a sort of reserve that does not come out at first. Forms, colors and mood are perfectly integrated between themselves and give his pictures a beautiful unity and serenity'' (quoted in Pierre Matisse and His Artists (exhibition catalogue), The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 2002, p. 86).