Yves Tanguy: 6 Facts About the Outstanding Surrealist

As a Surrealist artist, Yves Tanguy gets significantly less attention than his colleagues like Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, or Rene Magritte. Yet, his influence on the movement’s aesthetic and public perception was immense. Tanguy inspired the famous psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, contributed to the Abstract Expressionist scene, and even participated in the controversy surrounding Salvador Dali’s highly questionable political views. Here are six facts about the great Surrealist artist Yves Tanguy.

Yves Tanguy was one of the most important and influential Surrealist painters who had no aspiration of becoming a painter at all—at least, at first. Rumors say that he had a symbolic connection to the world of arts from his very first moments of life. Allegedly, his mother gave birth to him on the bed that belonged to Gustave Courbet. Still, his artistic inclinations did not become apparent until his mature age and his creative choices were radically different from those of the great Realist Courbet.

Born in 1900 into a maritime family, Yves was ready to continue the family tradition by becoming a cargo boat officer. Sea and coastal views were formative to his later artistic career. As a child, he spent his summers in Brittany, the northwestern region of France stretching into the Atlantic Ocean. He never spoke about his childhood much, but noted his longtime phobias of bulrush plants and, surprisingly, beach chairs that came from these years. As a teenager, he befriended the son of Henri Matisse Pierre, the future art collector and dealer.

Tanguy liked to draw for fun, but never considered the possibility of becoming an artist full-time, until one day in 1923 when he saw a painting made by Giorgio de Chirico. Struck by the barren landscapes and sharp contrasts, he instantly decided to change his career. Surprisingly, he never sought education or guidance from his friends, preferring to learn on his own.

2.  Tanguy Was a Devoted Surrealist 

Soon, Tanguy befriended other aspiring artists and writers through his friend Matisse and the chief ideologist of Surrealism and the movement’s founder, Andre Breton. By 1927, Tanguy had already developed his signature style and had his first exhibition. He struggled with money, but not with appreciation. Breton was so impressed with Tanguy’s work that he offered him a contract to paint 12 paintings a year in exchange for an allowance.

Tanguy was a devoted Surrealist who eagerly participated in group exhibitions and publications. His appearance and manners were also inspirational to his peers, albeit, quite shocking. Andre Breton wrote that Surrealism was essentially “the appearance of Yves Tanguy, crowned with the big emerald bird of Paradise”—equally marvelous and absurd. His chaotic thin hair and mischievous grimace became emblematic of the Parisian Surrealist group. Tanguy’s eccentric habits soon became both legendary and infamous. His favorite party trick was eating live spiders, preferably soaked in red wine or spread over a piece of bread. Still, apart from his clownish and sometimes disturbing jokes, he was a private person, carefully maintaining his inner world in order.

One of the most popular artistic techniques employed by Surrealists in both painting and writing was automatism. The act of producing images or text in a semi-unconscious state of uncontrolled mind was not entirely new. Previously, it was used by spiritualists and medium artists like Hilma af Klint and explained through stories about spirits coming into contact with humans. Surrealists, however, operated with psychoanalytical terms, seeing their automatic images as messages from the depth of one’s psyche.

Tanguy explained his preference for automatic methods from a less hyper-intellectualized point of view. He simply liked to be surprised by his own work. Compositions planned in advance and thoroughly executed did not bring him as much joy and excitement as the process of images unfolding in front of his eyes in an unexpected way. That being said, Tanguy was deeply concentrated on each work, making only one at a time.

Unlike other artists who drew inspiration from the writings of Freud and Jung, Yves Tanguy likely inspired one of them. In 1929, Carl Jung purchased Tanguy’s painting Noyer Indifferent. Jung kept it in his study while working on his theory of the collective unconscious and interpretations of modern art. In his 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Jung mentions the painting, describing it as the expression of human detachment and eternal cosmic abandonment.

4. He Was Surprisingly Conservative in His Art

Despite being a member of the most fashionable and progressive art movements of his time, Tanguy did not share the desire of many artists to experiment and discover new forms and styles. He hated routine and discipline and preferred to work on sheer joy and excitement. He also quite openly despised artists who changed their style or philosophy frequently. He even accused them of trying to artificially maintain their relevance for the public. Yves’ style developed from naive experiments to mature and complex works. His imagery evolved, yet stayed within the single aesthetical domain. Some art historians and Tanguy’s contemporaries believed that the absence of formal training helped Tanguy avoid disseminating his efforts and form a coherent recognizable style, unspoiled by excessive academic knowledge and demands.

Like in the case of many other Surrealists, Tanguy’s imagery was deeply personal and generated by his traumas and experiences. Yet the important peculiarity of Tanguy’s work was in the inherent order of his Surrealist realm. His subconsciousness was a single yet endless place, organized according to a certain plan, familiar only to him. All his deserted seascapes were precisely executed and balanced, borrowing from his childhood memories, fears, and preoccupations.

As an active member of the Parisian circle of Surrealists, Tanguy often took part in formative decisions within the movement. One of those was the scandalous expulsion of Salvador Dali. Dali was never the beloved group member—too bizarre even to the eccentric crowd of the Surrealists. However, his personal oddities could not compare to the depth of his political peculiarities. Dali was obsessed with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi imagery to an uncomfortable and highly eroticized extent. Moreover, he was on friendly terms with Spain’s Fascist dictator Francisco Franco who forced many other Spanish Surrealists like Remedios Varo to flee home and fear for their lives.

Andre Breton, an anti-fascist activist apart from his literary career, was greatly concerned with Dali’s behavior and ideas. By 1934, the artist overstepped all possible boundaries by sending Breton a letter describing his enjoyment of reading news about the lynching of Black people in the USA. Breton carefully preserved all these letters and organized a trial, accusing Dali of glorification of Hitlerian fascism. A collective letter, signed by Yves Tanguy among others after the event, formulated the official expulsion of Salvador Dali from the Surrealist circles. Dali, as egocentric and delusional as ever, claimed that he was the only real Surrealist and that his art was as apolitical as ever.

6. Yves Tanguy Moved to the USA

By the mid-1930s, Tanguy became an unexpectedly rich and famous artist in high demand. He never learned how to spend that money properly. According to his then-partner Peggy Guggenheim, he had a habit of throwing crumpled banknotes at strangers out of boredom. Tanguy often complained about being confused and overwhelmed with his sudden fortune. He broke off his relationship with Guggenheim after meeting the American Surrealist Kay Sage. Sage worked in a style similar to Tanguy’s yet preferred to focus on minimalist architectural forms.

In 1939, Tanguy and Sage left Europe, running from World War II. Sage, as an American citizen, immediately started her work on moving other artists overseas. Alongside her, Peggy Guggenheim arranged passages for artists as well, as did Frida Kahlo in Mexico, accepting those turned away by the USA officials.

In 1940, Sage and Tanguy got married. Their presence on the American art scene, as well as interactions with local artists, helped forge the phenomenon called Abstract Expressionism, a unique art movement that made New York the center of the global art world for decades to come. The work of Tanguy greatly influenced the masters of American art like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Tanguy’s own career was cut short at the age of only 55 after he suffered an unexpected fatal stroke.