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1900-1955
COMPOSITION

12.8 by 18.7cm., 5 by 7 3/8 in.

signed Yves Tanguy and dedicated Pour Germaine (lower right)

gouache on board

PROVENANCE

Elkon Gallery, New York
Timothy Baum, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1991

NOTE

Yves Tanguy was invited by André Breton to become a member of the Surrealist Group in 1925 and in 1927 he exhibited at his first one-man show at the Galerie Surrealiste. Tanguy had developed a unique style by this time, a method of painting that was neat in execution and dreamlike in subject matter. The organic forms in the present work are reminiscent of the artist's early days in Finistère, Britanny, where he was influenced by the monolithic rocky landscape and the colossal dolmen so characteristic of the region. Tanguy also travelled in North Africa in 1930, an inspiration for so many artists of the early twentieth Century:

'After his African voyage, Tanguy usually substituted mineral forms for the vegetal ones used in earlier works. His color became more complex and varied, with extremes of light and dark replacing the relatively even tonality of his previous pictures. At the same time he made more and more frequent use of one of his most poetic inventions -- the melting of land into sky, one image metamorphosed into another, as in the moving-picture technique known as lap-dissolve. The fixed horizon was now often replaced by a continuous and flowing treatment of space, and in many paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, it is extremely difficult to determine at what point earth becomes sky or whether objects rest on the ground or float aloft. The ambiguity is intensified by changes in the density of the objects themselves, from opaque to translucent to transparent, creating a spatial double entendre' (J.T. Soby, Yves Tanguy, Museum of Modern Art, New York (exhibition catalogue), 1955, pp. 17 & 18).