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Titre inconnu (Noy‚r indiff‚rent) signed and dated 'YVES TANGUY 29' (lower right) oil on canvas 361/4 x 283/4in. (92 x 73cm.) Painted in 1929 PROVENANCE Kunsthaus, Z쳌rich, included in the sale of abstract and Surrealist paintings and sculpture (October-November 1929). Professor Carl Gustav Jung, Zurich (from 1929), and thence by descent to the present owner. LITERATURE P. Matisse, Yves Tanguy, un recueil de ses oeuvres, Paris 1963, no. 90 (illustrated p. 68). P. Waldberg, Yves Tanguy, Brussels 1977 (illustrated p. 78) C. G. Jung, Zivilisation im šbergang, Switzerland 1986 (illustrated no. 4). EXHIBITION Z쳌rich, Ausstellung Abstrakte und Surrealistische Malerei und Plastik, Kunsthaus Z쳌rich, October-November 1929, no. 136. Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Yves Tanguy Retrospecktive 1925-1955, October 1982-January 1983, no. 34 (illustrated p. 64). Stuttgard, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Yves Tanguy und der Surrealismus, December 2000, no. 31, (illustrated p. 60). NOTES "Surrealism is so often seen as an urban phenomenon, the Surrealists, a group of poet ethnographers wandering through Paris in search of the unexpected and chance encounters, that the pervasive references to nature and natural history, metaphorical or actual, as well as landscape, tend to be underestimated. Nature was a source of wonder no less than the city's flea markets and studios; Breton illustrated l'Amour fou with photographs of crystals and of corals and marine organisms from the Great Barrier Reef, for him instilled with 'convulsive beauty'. " (Dawn Ades : "Yves Tanguy's Horizons" in exhib.cat. Klee, Tanguy, Miro, Museum moderner Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, 2000, p. 176) Titre inconnu ("Unknown Title") is a large and mysterious early painting that powerfully evokes a sense of the dark recessive depths of the unconscious mind through Tanguy's sparse use of seemingly maritime imagery. Formerly in the collection of Carl Gustav Jung, Titre inconnu is almost unique among modern paintings in that it was the specific subject of a ground-breaking essay by the great psychiatrist in which he explored the link between archetypes and the modern imagination in connection with the increasing phenomenon of UFO sightings. Entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things seen Flying in the Sky, Jung explained in this essay how Titre inconnu is a remarkable work that had repeatedly been interpreted in a number of differing ways by the many people he had shown it to. He himself interpreted the scene as a city on fire as seen from an aerial perspective, but he was fully aware of how many people thought otherwise. One of several works by Tanguy whose deliberately strange and often random titles have now been lost, the painting was once exhibited at the exhibition Abstrakte und Surrealistische Malerei und Plastike in 1929, Kunsthaus Z쳌rich, no. 136, under the title of Noy‚ indiff‚rent ( "The indifferent drowned one") - a title which, like so many of Tanguy's paintings, suggests a nautical theme. Earlier, in the mid-1920s Tanguy had met the Breton artist Toch‚ who often worked from his subject wearing dark glasses in order to preserve the clarity of the image and in order to establish a nocturnal tonality to his work. Toch‚'s influence may well be the source of the smoked-glass effect of many of Tanguy's paintings and an inspiration behind Tanguy's decision to paint such extraordinarily dark paintings as the present work. In Titre inconnu a dense black layer of paint has been applied in a series of horizontal wave-like patterns and this undulating rhythm has been highlighted in places by a smeared glueish white that has been scraped over the surface to accentuate the sense of recession towards an unseen horizon. The fluidity of the painting's surface unavoidably conjurs a sense of the deep mystery of the ocean. At the same time, the delicate and seemingly soft amorphic forms which sparsely populate this desolate landscape of the mind only seem to articulate further the vast emptiness of the rippled black space. Seeming like bizarre anemones and other invertebrate sea creatures, the placement of these weird forms within the canvas is arranged in an "S"-shaped progression that leads the eye inexorably towards the pictorial void of the absent horizon. With two small amorphic forms ultimately disappearing into the dark shadows in the centre-right of the painting, Titre inconnu is a work that would have appealed greatly to Andr‚ Breton who once famously remarked, "I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on..... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight. " (Andr‚ Breton, Le Surr‚alisme et la peinture, 1928.).
