The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.
biography
Progression of Art
1927
Mama, Papa is Wounded!
The vast space, wan palette, and unearthly light in this picture evoke a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Airborne objects cast dark shadows, echoing the work of the earlier Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. The cactus-like shape tethered to a geometric spider-web, and floating near the horizon, seems neither captive nor fully free. Typical of the relationship between words and images in Surrealism, the title complicates rather than clarifies the meaning of the work. With Breton (who, as a war medic, had used Sigmund Freud's methods to treat psychologically damaged soldiers) Tanguy combed psychiatric case studies of patients whose statements could be used as ideas for pictures and titles. According to Tanguy, Mama, Papa is Wounded! was among them. Various interpretations of this picture have been suggested. For example, that it references the violence of World War I and expressed the mood of heightened anxiety that followed. Or that the standing yellow figure may represent a father, the cactus a mother, and the amorphous mass a child. The work remains enigmatic, however, refusing to reveal its secrets, and reflecting the intentional ambiguity of Surrealist symbolism.
Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York
1929
Noyer Indifférent
This painting's fascinating provenance illustrates the reciprocal interplay between surrealism and psychoanalysis. Carl Jung, Freud's protégé and an important influence on the Surrealists, purchased this work in 1929, when Tanguy was almost unknown. Jung kept it in his study, where it influenced (and maybe even helped inspire) his theory of the collective unconscious in 1958. Against total darkness, four biomorphic forms surround a central cobweb shape and seem to levitate, casting shadows. Are these animals? Smoke? Fungi? Plastic? The faint horizontal bands stretching across the canvas create an ambiguous nocturnal atmosphere Tanguy's genius, perfectly summed up by Jung, was a "minimum of intelligibility with a maximum of abstraction." Jung interpreted the picture as an unconscious collective fantasy of the technological age, showing it to as many people as possible to test their interpretations. They saw bombs, distant planets, underwater creatures and cities lit up at night. Jung saw in the artist's bleak horizons a "cosmic inhumanness and infinite desolation" that triggered the viewer's unconscious. He concluded that the picture was an archetypal sign of the heavens, linking it to recent extraterrestrial phenomena. The feeling of empty stillness this work provokes was observed by Paul Eluard, in his poem, dedicated to Tanguy, with the following words: "From the ends of the earth to the twilight of today/Nothing can withstand my desolate images".
Oil on canvas - Privately owned
1942
Indefinite Divisibility
From the bowls collecting water to the anthropomorphic shadow cast by the form beside it, a jumble of conflicting shapes confronts the viewer, vying for our attention. Dreams and realities merge in objects such as a pedal, a propeller, and a clamp. These are three-dimensional objects about to topple to the ground. Tanguy's intention is to express, not to communicate - to trigger sensations, not to explain. Tanguy relied upon his subconscious to supply him with ideas for paintings: "the painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses." What is reality and what is shadow? For Freud, the heightened anxiety created by his use of depaysement (the state of disorientation experienced in dreams) was a form of psychosis, delusions and illusions. For Tanguy, it was a source of power. Surrealists celebrated madness as both an inspiration and liberation, as Breton said in dreams you could: "kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content." In 1950 the Psychological Institute of Vienna displayed Tanguy's paintings beside those of schizophrenic patients to see if the public could distinguish between the two. They could not (a result that delighted the Surrealists). Breton believed that one day Tanguy's images "will be made clear with a language which is not yet understood but which people are soon going to read, which they are going to talk, and which they are going to perceive is best adapted to the new changes."
Oil on canvas - Albright - Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
1943
Through Birds, Through Fire, But Not Through Glass
Rock-like forms and a strange tower of balloon-shapes, wheel-spokes and stones inhabit this overcast dreamscape. The objects are solid, yet the composite form seems to be in transition. Is it molten or frozen? The palette of fiery reds and icy greys makes it impossible to tell. Joined in the illogic of the unconscious, these imposing forms cast shadows, imparting further mystery. There must be a sun behind them. It is possible that these forms were inspired by the Surrealist technique of Coulage - sculpture generated by pouring molten metal into water, generating amorphous blobs that evoked associations, somewhat like a Rorschach test. With one foot in fantasy, and one in reality, Tanguy, according to Andre Breton, "condensed ... a few pure elements of matter, meeting together and glowing suddenly like particles of dust dancing in a sunbeam." This otherworldly environment and its unknowable subject reflects a general interest among the Surrealists in mystery, ambiguity and transformation. For the Surrealists, the individual self and the external world are in a constant state of flux.
Oil on canvas - Minneapolis Institute of Arts
1950
Rose of the Four Winds
In this late canvas, a tower of hard architecture, built from clusters of sharp, spiky objects dominates a steely gray and purple sky. The ground is covered with forbidding rubble (in 1955, the MOMA exhibition called a 'breathless congestion of boulders, pebbles and bones'). The interplay among these elements (the looming tower, threatening sky, and low heaps of pebbles) is forbidding, bordering on the apocalyptic, and the stuff of nightmares rather than dreams. Reminiscent of bombed-out cities (war was never far from Tanguy's mind) these bleak aerial views are typical of the artist's late period. These often include sharper, non-organic and apparently mechanical elements, piling up and stabbing into vast skies (as found in works like From Pale Hands to Weary Skies (1950) and The Hunted Sky (1951)). After the bomb tests and the horror of Hiroshima, Tanguy, a sensitive observer, continued to evolve in relation to his environment and other artists. The impact of his wife Sage's larger, geometric forms is visible here, as is the vastness of the American landscape. Tanguy's admiration for the work of the younger American artist, Frederick Sommer, who photographed bones in the desert, is also visible here. One further influence, no doubt, is also present: in the garden at Sedona, Tanguy's friend Ernst had built a vast metal and cement sculpture named Capricorn. The tower here is reminiscent of this monumental sculpture sitting under the bleak open skies.
Oil on canvas - Wadsworth Atheneum
1954
Multiplication of the Arcs
Tanguy completed this large work in the months before his death - while working eight to nine hours a day in deep concentration. It is a familiar subject, one that the artist revisited in canvas after canvas since the 1920s: a dreamscape under a storm-threatened sky. Here, however, there are no towers, sculptural forms or airborne objects. Nothing rises above the horizon. Everything is tumbled and broken. Towers have crumbled into the ground. The broken tower, as Tanguy well knew, is a powerful sign, an archetypal sign of castration and death in psychoanalytic terms. Whereas Mama, Papa is Wounded! evokes a jarring claustrophobia inside a vast, empty space, this is essentially the reverse: isolation, amidst a crowd. The artist's posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 positioned this work as the culmination of Tanguy's work. While the title's reference is, like all Tanguy's titles, intentionally obscure, arcs were an iconic Surrealist symbol, a symbolic bridge between the invisible and the visible, fantasy and reality, sleeping and waking.
Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York
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