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Artist or Maker: Yves Tanguy (1900-1955)
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Provenance: The Elkon Gallery, New York.
Marlborough Gallery, Inc., New York (no. NON38.906).
Pace Wildenstein Gallery, New York (no. 31195).
Russeck Gallery, Palm Beach.
Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, New York, 11 May 2000, lot 294.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
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Literature: P. Matisse, Yves Tanguy, New York, 1963, no. 433 (illustrated p. 184).
P. Waldberg, Yves Tanguy, Brussels, 1977 (illustrated p. 281).
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
A highly complex and varied composition executed with a variety of sophisticated media techniques, Feu-volant (Flying Fire) is one of a dramatic and highly atmospheric series of gouaches that Tanguy made in America in the 1950s. Incorporating the sharp angular shard-like cut-outs that suddenly appeared and came to dominate Tanguy's work at this time, this painting generates the sinister atmosphere of a harsh and forbidding alien climate. Painted in 1951 at the onset of the new Post-War era in America - a time dominated in Tanguy's mind by the atmosphere of the Cold War, thoughts of atomic power and McCarthyism - Feu-volant is a work that eloquently conveys the cold strangeness of the brave new world in which Tanguy found himself living.
Entitled Changes in Pierre Matisse's catalogue raisonné of Tanguy's work, the gouache is also titled Feu-volant on the reverse (a title which Matisse himself documented in his catalogue raisonné as being of an unknown work of Tanguy's from this period). While Changes is a title that reflects the general atmosphere of strangeness that permeates this work and many others of the period, the title Feu-volant evidently relates to the fiery sky at the centre of the work. In his gouaches of this period Tanguy seemed to embrace abstraction, becoming increasingly experimental when painting the empty vistas at the heart of his works and employing a wide range of painterly style that sometimes even included decalcomania. In this work the tempestuous sky is rendered as a dramatic abstraction framed by the window of monuments and shard-like cut-outs that seem, like solar panels or broken sheets of glass to reflect a blinding sun-like light in the foreground.
Predominantly vertical in their format, these paintings with 'cut-out' shards transform the beguiling atmosphere of Tanguy's earlier amorphic landscapes into an altogether sharper and more sinister psychological reflection of a seemingly precipitous or critical mental state. Coldly mechanical in their forms and predominantly grey in tone and colour, they articulate a strange new world of miltaristic form, cold existential reality and ominous foreboding.
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