Yves Tanguy by ExquisiteCorpse

by ~TheCreativeComplex

TANGUY-THE GEOMETER OF DREAMS
by John Ashbery

I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. Very much alone in my work, I am almost jealous of it. Geography has no bearing on it, nor have the interests of the community in which I work.

Thus Yves Tanguy, in a reply to a questionnaire on "The Creative Process" published in Art Digest in 1954.

Faced with such a carefully worded caveat, one hesitates to discuss his work at all. Nor do the paintings themselves invite description or analysis. Self created, totally autonomous, they exist in a world where time, space and light are functions of other natural laws than ours. Tanguy's landscapes, if they are landscapes, are not so much inhospitable as alien: neither vegetable nor mineral but an amalgam of both, absorbed in their own being, facing in another direction. "From the ends of the earth to the twilight of today/Nothing can withstand my desolate images," wrote Tanguy's friend Paul Eluard in a poem entitled "Yves Tanguy."

Hence one's reluctance to speak of these images, but also the necessity of doing so implied in the poet's accurate statement that they cannot be withstood. Nor is Tanguy the first artist to avoid discussions of his work, and thus by implication seek to place it beyond the pale of language. Most artists would like to believe that their work renders criticism superfluous, since criticism is included in the act of creation. Some few, in Hazlitt's famous phrase, "defy calculation or comparison, and can be defined only by themselves. They are sui generis, and make the class to which they belong." Tanguy might be said to belong to this category of artists, and the remoteness of his work seems to make it even more impervious to "calculation or comparison" even as it obliges one to pick up these tools.

Therefore one may begin by challenging Tanguy's statement that geography has no bearing on his work. It has often been pointed out that memories of childhood summers in Brittany emerged later in his paintings, just as the shoreline of the Costa Brava reappears obsessively in Dali's. In the vicinity of Locronan, where Tanguy's parents had a house, are fields strewn with prehistoric menhirs and dolmens, and James Thrall Soby has pointed out their mutated presence in his paintings. Locronan is also near the site of the legendary sunken city of Ys, whose sea-changed architecture could have resembled the architecture in Tanguy's later paintings (such as the "steeples" in From Pale Hands to Weary Skies 1950, No.45). The bizarre rock formations of the Breton coast are evoked in a little-known text called On Silence by de Chirico, whose work first determined Tanguy to become a painter:

O evening of Quiberon! In subposes of lassitude and sleep the warriors are stretched out now in the final repose while over there behind the black cliffs, with their gothic apostles' profiles, a moon of boreal pallor is rising in the great silence, softly its rays light up the faces of the dead and waken reflection in the metal of their arms.

Finistere is the westernmost tip of France, the point closest to the setting sun. From a rocky promontory one looks out over the vast fields of the Atlantic with the tiny flat island of Sein a short distance offshore but separated from the mainland by notoriously treacherous currents, like the invisible flux one senses in Tanguy's spaces. (There is a 1930 photograph of Tanguy, looking happy and triumphant, aboard the small ferry that ran between Sein and the mainland.) Real geography also intruded briefly in his work after a trip to North Africa in 1930, where he was fascinated by some strange rock formations. Yet one must end by agreeing with Tanguy when he says that geography has no bearing on his work, insofar as geography implies any kind of local color. The geographical elements just noted are rather objects, extreme examples of the other-planetary look which our planet exhibits here and there- windows on a supra-visible world rather than vignettes of this one.

The Duchesse de Guermantes advised Proust's narrator Marcel that the best way to view the paintings of Frans Hals in Haarlem was from the top of a moving streetcar. Tanguy's first climactic contact with painting came in 1923 while he was riding on the platform of a bus in the rue La Boétie, and glimpsed two early paintings by de Chirico in the window of Paul Guillaume's gallery. Soon after the discovery of de Chirico he began painting, though the way had doubtless been prepared in advance, and an early pencil drawing made some six years earlier when Tanguy was about 17 has survived. One of his first paintings, The Rue de la Santé, suggests de Chirico in its exaggeratedly steep perspectives and oversize buildings. It is not incompetently done, but perhaps Tanguy's realization that he lacked the technical mastery of de Chirico drove him next into a deliberately naive style as well as toward a different kind of subject matter. One of the finest of these early pictures is Fantômas, 1925-26, No.1, based on the series of detective novels that also inspired the poets Apollinaire and Max Jacob. The stories recounted the atrocious crimes of the arch-fiend Fantômas, master of a hundred disguises, always one jump ahead of his dogged police pursuers. The cover of one of the novels shows Fantômas masked and in elegant evening clothes, towering over a Lilliputian Paris at his feet Tanguy's painting has a figure in the sky that could be that of Fantômas, and next to it an outlined face that could be that of Lady Beltham, his mistress; the space below is occupied by at least one victim and perhaps some pursuers. But even in an atypical "literary" painting such as this, no very accurate reading is possible. Space and perspective are methodically distorted; it is impossible to gauge distances by the size of the figures, and there is some iconography (the cluster of eggs, the decorative panel on the left and the clownlike figure on the right), which seems not to relate to the story of Fantômas. The stage seems set for the radical transformations which will very shortly sweep it almost bare.

The paintings of 1927 still juggle recognizable objects along with purely imaginary ones in fantastic landscapes. He Did What He Wanted, 1927, No 3 suspends in space a hexagonal pointed weight whose flat surface is ornamented with letters of the alphabet and some wavy lines; there is a figure of a man in the background and less decipherable, root-like shape in the foreground. As in Miró's paintings of the same period, abstraction and fanciful figuration co-exist: on a background which may be merely stippled brush-effects float objects which are sometimes taken from nature, sometimes abstract doodling, sometimes a combination of the two. Some of these are already major works, such as A Large Painting Which Is a Landscape, 1927, No.5. Here the flat receding surface is striated with alternating light and dark bands, like the shadows of ripples on a sandy sea floor, a notion further suggested by the presence of a cloudlike school of "fish" in the sky, but contradicted by the strong lighting of the kind of pyramid on the left and by the horizon at the back. Subsequently Tanguy was to find even subtler ways of confusing the viewer's sense of perspective, of mingling earth and sky, the solid and the intangible.

A change in his work occurred in 1930 after the trip to North Africa. He produced a half- dozen pictures whose shapes suggest the fantastic rock formations in the paintings of Bosch or Patinir, and for the first and last time in his career he drew directly on the canvas before beginning to paint. (In the Art Digest questionnaire he stated: "The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.") With the abandonment of this method, so far removed from the theoretical automatism of Surrealism, Tanguy entered the final mature phase of his work which was to develop slowly and meticulously until his death.

Henceforth, as Soby points out, Tanguy began to substitute mineral forms for the vegetal ones in his earlier paintings. Perhaps this was the result of his experience of the North African landscape, but Marcel Jean, in his History of Surrealist Painting, suggests another, deeper reason. As the importance of the Surrealist movement in art began to be recognized, the Surrealists' work took on a new density, a new solidity.

The possibility of overcoming the limits usually assigned to man's aspirations became clear... Thanks to an increas- ingly complete identification with inner reality, their work began to assume a more precise and in some ways more sculptural character (an evolution that is particularly noticeable with Tanguy), resulting from the harmony between the inner object and its representative. It could be said that the Surrealists' pro- ductions had originally been presentative, since they helped to create the reality they described a still indeterminate reality shaped almost entirely from the future. Later they acquired more re- presentative qualities, and hence speci- fic and permanent traits, and character- istic, autonomous signs.

What had been sketched and "in the air" in the days of Dada and the early period of Surrealism began to assume, for Tanguy at any rate, the full contours, the rich mineral colors, the strong light and cast shadows, the space that while still ambiguous is now emphatically so, as though the landscape were a real one in which the laws of perspective had been suspended. Objects of a type never encountered yet obviously real are strung out on an infinite plain. They have the brightness of pebbles viewed under water. They communicate with each other, exist in relation to one another, sometimes are even attached to one another by thread or other bonds, and their relationships are strangely explicit though the protagonists themselves are of an unknown species. What is curious is that, despite their disconcerting remoteness, these landscapes lack the metaphysical melancholy of de Chirico, the "paranoia" of Dali, the violence of Ernst. The feeling is one of calm exaltation. Perhaps because these objects seem to exist and to know they exist, their existence, bizarre and even macabre as it is, never threatens our idea of our own existence but seconds and supports it. Tanguy's world is hardly an inviting one, but its space seems to promise infinite possibilities. It has the limpidity of the poetry of Holderlin or Novalis, where time seems to have become a solid, transparent object, no longer a vehicle of change and vicissitudes. Such is the universe of The Geometer of Dreams, 1935, No.13, The Great Nacre Butterfly, 1939, No.19, Satin Tuning-Fork, 1939, No.21: silent, luminous masterpieces produced in the 1930s as though to deny the outward darkness that deepened each year, and to which Tanguy like most of his contemporaries was acutely sensitive (as early as 1934 the rise of Fascism in Europe had caused him to try to emigrate to America with the Surrealist painter Paalen, but he was unable to obtain the necessary papers).

In 1939 Tanguy met the American painter Kay Sage in Paris and in November of that year, having been exempted from military service due to disabilities from the last war, he joined her in New York. After a trip to the west where Tanguy was struck by the resemblance of geological phenomena there to his own paintings, they were married and shortly thereafter moved to Woodbury, Connecticut. In 1946 they bought a farmhouse there where Tanguy lived until his death in 1955 (his widow died in 1963).

In André Breton's Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Tanguy is quoted as saying that he came to America to escape the war, but he speaks of the freedom he found here in plastic terms.

Here in the United States the only change I can distinguish in my work is possibly in my palette. What the cause of this intensification of color is I can't say. But I do recognize a considerable change. Perhaps it is due to the light. I also have a feeling of greater space here more 'room' But that was why I came here.

It was not only Tanguy's palette which intensified in America. Thanks no doubt to the peaceful mode of existence he enjoyed in Woodbury, the freedom from the material difficulties which had always plagued him, and the distance from the war, he was able to embark on a series of paintings of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. His colors are "nasturtium, cock-of-the-rock, poplar leaf, rusty wellchain, cut sodium, slate, jellyfish and cinnamon," as André Breton enumerated them. The forms and the substances of which they appear to be made have altered. The universe is no longer exclusively mineral; some of its tenants appear to be made of wood, paper or cloth. There are strange tissue-like folds, bones, creatures not only colored like jellyfish but of, the same viscous milky white/ or magenta pulp, weeping, burning to the touch like sodium. And these forms have begun to pro-liferate, pullulate, assuming ever more complex, incestuous relationships. The inbred, interlocking shapes in such a painting as My Life, White and Black, 1944, No.35, defy any attempt to describe them and it is almost as though the painter were aiming at a freedom of painting beyond the constricting qualifications of language, explicable only in its own terms. They remind one of the fantastically complicated "machines célibataires" described in the novels of Raymond Roussel, of the writers the Surrealists most admired though he was not a member of their group. (The title of one of Tanguy's early canvases, Les Vues, 1929, No.10, may be an allusion to Roussel's long poem La Vue, whose laborious cataloguing of minutiae prefigures Tanguy's spirit). Roussel's "demoiselle" in his novel Locus Solus- a kind of aerial pile driver capable of constructing a finely detailed mosaic of teeth -has the same almost insolent awareness of its own improbable being as the central colossus in Tanguy's My Life, White and Black, 1944, No.35.

In the 1940s Tanguy's forms, as they take on new bulk and density, also move closer to the spectator- too close for comfort at times, as in Twice, 1944, No.33, which thrusts a fleshy mass draped in a sheet, which it has stained a deep pink, almost into the viewer's face. The poetry of distant horizons is often replaced by a drama, sometimes tinged with eroticism, which is taking place in the foreground, and the spectator, instead of viewing the scene from a slight height as in many of the early paintings, is often placed slightly below the arena of action, as though in an orchestra pit, for example in Twice, 1944, No.33, Equivocal Colors, 1943, No.27, and The Provider, 1945, No.37, three paintings in which the new massive biomorphic forms, daubed with traces of brilliant, chemical colors, predominate. Sometimes the hallucinatory intensity of these colors seems imbued with its own specific gravity, as though it were heavier than the object of which it is a property, as in the strange "night" piece of 1942, Slowly toward the North, 1942, No.26. On a black plain, before an ultramarine sky lit by white flares, a congress of strange object-creatures has convened. One is taller and wears as a miter of authority a triangular shape wrapped in white paper. The smaller figure does not seem to have lost out to the taller despite being ensnared in a white wire construction that extends tar into the background: it wears its rubbery dull green and red leather "head" defiantly. In the foreground is a small object consisting of an orange ball connected by a rod to a larger black-and-white striped melon-shape that suggests Kafka's Odradek, a living creature made of spools which the narrator occasionally meets in the stairway of his home and which saddens him with the thought that it will outlive him. And perhaps Tanguy was remembering here and in other paintings of the forties the colored fishing floats and wooden jigsaw shapes from de Chirico's metaphysical period.

The swollen volumes and more fibrous, corruptible substances in some of the forties paintings are in turn questioned, dissected and parceled out in the work Tanguy did in the last five years of his life, culminating in his final masterpiece, the Museum of Modern Art's Multiplication of Arcs, which James Thrall Soby has called "a sort of boneyard of the world." Sometimes his aim seems analytical, as though to break down large forms into their irregularly shaped components, as in Fear, 1949, No.44. These irreducible elements can be pebble-shaped, notched, pierced; sometimes they are long and painfully attenuated thorns. At other times it looks as though the particles had drawn together to form a compact mass like a puzzle sphere. In the magnificent From Pale Hands to Weary Skies, 1950, No. 45, long splintered shapes are bound together to form a group of prickly spires like the strangely elongated ones of Coutances cathedral or (in the case of the one above) like the organic architecture of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. Equally magisterial is The Hunted Sky, 1951, No.51- two looming, parahuman beings made up of countless grey, osseous pebble shapes seemingly magnetized around a central core, with papery white plaques like fragments of shells dropped by gulls embedded in them. The swarming atoms of these late pictures are like the hordes of tiny soldiers in a battle painting by Altdorfer, here turned to stone or bone through some enchantment. The dusty greys from his earlier paintings tend to veil the vibrant color of the forties pictures, although his rich palette and dramatic contrasts of light and dark reassert themselves in paintings like Imaginarv Numbers or The Saltimbanques, two other major works from the last months of his life.

Sarance Alexandrian has written that Tanguy's titles were arbitrarily chosen and should not be looked to explain the content of the pictures, and it is true that he often asked his friends to suggest titles; he and Breton found the title for one of his best-known early paintings, Mama, Papa Is Wounded!, in a book of psychiatric case-histories. Yet the fact that most of them are titled implies that a choice has been made, and that the purpose of this choice is to extend the range of the picture's meaning by slanting it in a certain direction: as with Satie or Wallace Stevens, the title is a rudder. An engaging little piano piece by Satie becomes something else when it is called "Disagreeable Glimpses"; Stevens' poem "Mrs. Alfred Uruguay" changes when it is construed as a portrait. Tanguy's titles are like filters which project an oddly appropriate light on a scene that cannot be rationally deduced from them. It is the arbitrary but invincible logic of the cadavre exquis, the poetic game of chance which Tanguy used to participate in with his Surrealist friends in the twenties. -

This brings one to a further aspect of Tanguy's work: its Surreality. It is usually a pointless exercise to discuss the work of a great artist in terms of "isms," but it may be excusable here on the grounds that the word Surrealism, unlike Cubism, Expressionism and the others that our century has produced, has been so thoroughly absorbed into our language and debased that we are no longer very sure, if we ever were, exactly what it means.

Anything out of the ordinary is called "surreal." Surrealism when applied to art evokes images of drooping watches and fur-lined teacups, but what is the principle of which these are apparently manifestations? In the early days of the Surrealists, great emphasis was placed by Breton and the others on automatism. Automatic writing was practiced for awhile, though even the Surrealists soon tired of it, but automatism was not a viable possibility in art until much later, in the hands of an artist like Jackson Pollock. In 1925 the writer Pierre Naville declared in La Révolution Surréaliste that Surrealist painting did not and could not exist:

Everyone knows now that there is no Surreal- ist painting. Neither pencil-marks recording chance gestures, nor images representing dream figures, nor imaginary fantasies, of course, can be so qualified.

Yet artists persisted in the attempt to produce Surrealist art. Since "automatic" art did seem to be out of the question, a trick, a procedure had to be found to remove the artist, or at least his conscious mind, from the creative process so that the irrational could take over. Max Ernst put to his own use the techniques of collage and frottage, which put the artist at one remove from the work. Masson practiced a kind of automatic drawing and used sand as an arbitrary element in some of his paintings. Wolfgang Paalen invented the technique of fumage, in which smudges from a candle flame held close to the canvas dictated the shape of the image. And Tanguy sometimes painted his pictures upside down and reversed them for their effect. In all these instances the governing principle seems to be not so much automatism (even in the case of Masson's drawings, which look premeditated) but that of self-abnegation in the interests of a superior realism, one which will reflect both the realities of the spirit (rather than the individual consciousness) and that of the world as perceived by it: the state in which "Je est un autre" in Rimbaud's famous phrase.

This revolution is still continuing (although the term Surrealism has fallen into disfavor), and "pencil marks recording chance gestures," as well as the other forms of art condemned by Naville, are accepted today. And although Tanguy cannot be said to have had an important influence on the artists who succeeded him, he seems more than any other Surrealist painter to embody the spirit of Surrealism- not in the parochial 1920's sense of the term, but in the fecund, open sense in which it can still be said to animate the most advanced art being done today. One reason for this is that the arbitrary distinction between abstract and figurative painting did not exist for Tanguy, who painted real if non-existent objects, so that his work is in a sense a fusion of the two, always in the interests of a more integral realism. The automatic gestural painting of Pollock, Kline and their contemporaries, looks very different from the patient, minute, old-master technique of Tanguy, yet he was perhaps the Poussin of the same inner landscape of which Pollock was the Turner. Both pushed the concept of art a little further in their exclusive attention to what Eluard, reviewing a play by Raymond Roussel, defined as "all that has never been, which alone interests us."