Too short a life (died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 55), French born with the century (1900) naturalized American (in 1948), Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy will have been the painter for whom the unconscious wants to be sovereign. His automatist experiments and his dreamlike landscapes bring him closer to the surrealists, a group he joined in 1925.
"The appearance of Tanguy in the Neptunian light of clairvoyance gradually tightens the thread of the horizon that had broken. But it is with him a new horizon, the one on which the landscape will be ordered in depth no longer physical but mental. […] The strictly invented being-objects that populate his canvases enjoy their own affinities that translate in the only happy way - the non-literal way - everything that can be an object of emotion in the universe," wrote André Breton in 1941.
In 1925, it was upon discovering a canvas ("Le cerveau de l'enfant") by Giorgio De Chirico in a Parisian gallery that Yves Tanguy decided to become a painter. Self-taught, he produced his first oils and exhibited for the first time (Salon de l'Araignée, Paris); he experimented with collective games with the surrealists, in particular that of the Exquisite Corpse where the association of writing and drawing fascinated him.
"The quality of color in Tanguy is a kind of milky consciousness. His universe is that of primitive man or of the child, an edible universe […] Tanguy's paintings place us inside a globe swollen with milk, at the center of an immense maternal breast […] Tanguy's painting is entirely food…,” writes Marcel Jean in his Histoire de la peinture surréaliste (Ed. Seuil, Paris, 1959).
The graphic work of Yves Tanguy is the subject of a catalogue raisonné (Das Druckgraphische Werk - The graphic work - L’oeuvre gravé, Düsseldorf, Wolfgang Wittrock, 1976), produced between 1932 and 1954, and contains only 19 references, some of which have one or more variants. Yves Tanguy's engravings illustrate the books published by his surrealist poet friends and it must be recognized that the graphic creation of the surrealists, overall, was extremely limited. It was only after the artist's death that graphic production became very popular. Yves Tanguy's engraved work gives the impression of an extremely concentrated representation of his creative power, and each of his works can be considered a major work. It should be noted that from his second engraving, in 1934, Tanguy worked with Stanley William Hayter and that Atelier 17 printed 16 of the artist's 19 engravings. Nicknamed by his peers "the most surrealist of the surrealists", Yves Tanguy's work combines the mystery and sobriety of his expression, plant forms and mineral concretions; Paul Eluard describes him as a "druid, guide of the time of the mistletoe druids" and Pierre Matisse as a "soothsayer in his element".