Lot 30 D

“Sans titre” is from the best period of Yves Tanguy’s oeuvre and displays his fully developed surrealist style.
Tanguy did not begin his autodidactic body of work as a painter until around 1923, when he was inspired by Giorgio de Chirico: his art began with figural-metaphysical images. His fundamental turn to surrealism occurred in 1926, at the point when he became acquainted with André Breton. Tanguy turned away from figuration and discovered his characteristic style of painting, in which he applied washes of colour to the finely woven canvas in an automatic process without preliminary drawing. The Galerie Surréaliste in Paris organised his first solo exhibition in 1927, and his mystical landscapes would become a key source of inspiration for Salvador Dalí.
This work is also defined by an expansive landscape – perhaps a beach before the dark line of the water’s edge or maybe a desert with dusk sinking down upon it. Pale rays of light strike and are swallowed up by the mysterious land; white wisps of cloud condense into a rising whirlwind. Detached from and uninfluenced by these atmospheric phenomena, sculptural organic forms hover in the foreground, some of them coloured green and some displaying a metallic-silvery shimmer. They are reminiscent of living creatures – molluscs, worms, single-celled organisms – and are nonetheless completely foreign.
“At this time, he was the only painter in his circle to have definitively eliminated any hint of familiar signs or conventional symbols from his oeuvre […]. He presents an alternative universe that possesses a compelling organic and combinatory reality but nonetheless seems inaccessible to us,” writes Robert Lebel (in: Yves Tanguy: Retrospektive, exh. cat. Staatl. Kunsthalle Baden-Baden 1982, p. 36). Breton would already declare Tanguy to be the archetypical surrealist painter in 1927. More than the other surrealists, Tanguy was devoted to the element of surprise that automatic painting holds in store for viewers as well as the artists themselves.