Yves Tanguy [exhibition and catalogue] by James Thrall Soby Author Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) Date 1955 Publisher [publisher not identified] Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3325 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art if i, ' yvestanguy LIBRARY Museumof ModernArt - ! IS ' \ photo Man Ray , 1936 BY JAMES THRALL SOBY The Museum of Modern Art TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART JOHN HAY WHITNEY, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD; HENRY ALLEN MOE, 1ST VICE-CHAIRMAN; PHILIP L. GOODWIN, 2ND VICE-CHAIRMAN; WILLIAM A. M. BURDEN, PRESIDENT; MRS. DAVID M. LEVY, 1ST VICE-PRESIDENT; ALFRED H. BARR, JR., MRS. ROBERT WOODS BLISS, STEPHEN C. CLARK, RALPH F. COLIN, MRS. W. MURRAY CRANE,* RENE D'HARNONCOURT, MRS. EDSEL B. FORD, A. CONGER GOODYEAR, MRS. SIMON GUGGENHEIM,* WALLACE K. HARRISON, JAMES W. HUSTED,* MRS. ALBERT D. LASKER, MRS. HENRY R. LUCE, RANALD H. MACDONALD, MRS. SAMUEL A. MARX, MRS. G. MACCULLOCH MILLER, WILLIAM S. PALEY, MRS. BLISS PARKINSON, MRS. CHARLES S. PAYSON, DUNCAN PHILLIPS,* ANDREW CARNDUFF RITCHIE, DAVID ROCKEFELLER, MRS. JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, 3RD, NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER, BEARDSLEY RUML, PAUL J. SACHS,* JOHN L. SENIOR, JR., JAMES THRALL SOBY, EDWARD M. M. WARBURG, MONROE WHEELER * Honorary Trustee for Life DEPARTMENT OF PAINTING AND SCULPTURE Andrew carnduff ritchie, Director; Margaret miller, Associate Curator; ALICE bacon, Research Assistant; ellen mary jones, Research Assistant; alicia b. legg, Secretary Copyright 1955 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 55-11796 contents LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7 YVES TANGUY by James Thrall Soby 9 PLATES 23 BIBLIOGRAPHY by Bernard Karpel 69 INDEX TO THE EXHIBITION 71 LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION Mr. and Mrs. LeRay W. Berdeau, Palm Beach; Andre Breton, Paris; Mme Simone Collinet, Paris; H. Sage Goodwin, Hartford, Conn.; John Goodwin, New York; Claude Hersent, Meudon, France; Ambassador and Mrs. Henri Hoppenot, Saigon, Indo China; Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Matisse, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Millard Meiss, Cambridge, Mass.; Roland Penrose, London; Mrs. Yves Tanguy, Woodbury, Conn.; Mr. and Mrs. Harry L. Winston, Birmingham, Mich. Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois, Urbana; Washington University, St. Louis. Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York. acknowledgments In the preparation of this exhibition and catalogue, my greatest debt is to the aitist s wife, Kay Sage Tanguy, and to Pierre Matisse, who was not only Tanguy's dealer but a schoolmate and lifelong friend. Both have helped devotedly with the task of assembling pictures and information, as has Patricia Matisse. I am also deeply indebted to Marcel Duhamel and Marcel Jean of Paris, who have made available their detailed knowledge of the life and career of their late friend. Duhamel's part in encouraging and helping sustain Tanguy during the latter's forma tive years as an artist, is recorded in the following pages; Marcel Jean has amplified in letters the biographical material about the painter recorded in his fine article for Ees lettres nouvelles (bibl.16). Mme Simone Collinet very kindly assisted in locating Tanguy paintings in Parisian collections. Andre Breton, leader of the suiiealist move- ment of whose esthetic or anti-esthetic Tanguy acted as an almost mediumistic inter preter, has shown a profound interest in the exhibition since it was first announced. From London Roland Penrose and E. L. T. Mesens have sent many pertinent facts about the artist and his imagery. The difficult task of translating some of the French titles of T anguy's works was entrusted to Robert Goldwater; other translations were made by Kay Sage I anguy. As Assistant Director of the exhibition, Margaret Miller has shown her usual perceptive efficiency; Frances Pernas has seen the catalogue through the press with care and dispatch. The Museum is grateful to Man Ray for permission to use as frontispiece in this book his superb photograph of the artist. On behalf of the Trustees of the Museum, I should like to thank the lenders whose generosity has made the exhibition possible. James Thrall Soby, Director of the Exhibition KanMaansMM Tanguy, at Lac du Bourget near Chemilieu, 1939 yvestanguy Tanguy was an artist who never tormented his inspiration. A slow, meticulous crafts man, working in an impeccable studio, he painted only when the spirit moved him — that steadfast, rare, creative spirit which remains a heartening phenomenon in the art of our time. He abhorred schedules and he abhorred stylistic change for its own sake. I remember his speaking with amused distaste of the attempt by a colleague to organize early hours of work for a group of artists, among them Tanguy, gathered at Chemilieu in 1939. He sometimes talked irritatedly of painters who felt obliged to evolve a new approach every few years, as a means of freshening their own and the public's interest in their work. Once he had found his direction —and he found it with startling abruptness —he followed it with devotion and purity, secret in his quest ("Yves behind the bars of his blue eyes," Andre Breton once wrote of him), and oblivious of the pres sures of fashion and commerce. As a result, his life work is integral to an extraordinary degree, its discipline a strengthening rather than a constricting force. Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy was born on January 5, 1900, on the Place de la Concorde in Paris at the Ministry of the Marine where his father, a retired sea captain, was an administrative official. Paradoxically, he was born in a bed that had belonged to Gustave Courbet, whose Realism's dependence on the external world stands in absolute contrast to Tanguy's faith in the hallucinatory objects and scenes of his subconscious mind. Nevertheless, the name "Gustave" had particular meaning for Tanguy, as he used to say, half in jest, writing down with care the anagram on his own name which Breton had invented from the letters G-u-s-t-a-v-e, Y-N-Y. He always remembered that the imagery of two other Gustaves — Moreau and Dore —had fed his macabre imagina tion in youth. Tanguy's childhood vacations were spent at his family's house at Locronan in the Finistere province of Brittany, and unquestionably this was the most important forma tive fact in the evolution of his vision as an artist. Neither in his art nor in conversation did he often refer in specific terms to childhood experience, though once he reluctantly confessed that he remembered three sources of terror in early youth: bullrushes, large beach chairs and the story of Humpty Dumpty. But the Finistere landscape made an immense impression on him. The fields near Locronan are peopled with menhirs and dolmens from prehistoric times and these, subjectively transformed, are frequent prop- 9 the boat. 1926. Collection Paul Carson, Paris " » «** Moreover, he never ddscape rocky shore, where objects float kiwi i SUbmanne lan of its depth and tide. ^ Underwattr ^ with the yt0ftenhWatChed Cal"ter' TocL^airrasYrpmreTh? 3'° Pai namedTodl,S atwork For the purpose he vLed ^ °"Vmed daylight values into those of evening. The parallel whh T C an artist is apparent thoutrh his „ , , ianguys own procedure as rxvsrr.rmechanical I ' i t"*transforming-*** agent was imaginative.*—-Z rather than mm and idl, Th~Z'"u,' «* W"d intentness as an artist His e " ° 1 anSuy showe a comparable an artist. Hts eye stayed on his painting. He seemed totalis, ; rtr to the murmurs around him, whether those of noli, , 7 lndlfferent in iqio-r , vuetner those of pohteness, derision or applause : - -" - .xrrsrrsssrrL-rr French Army, and was attached to an infantry regiment stationed at Lunevdle. Life in the provincial barracks brought on an acute state of depression. He put an end to his ordeal by volunteering for service in Tunis and was finally released by the Army. But at Luneville he had met a fellow-Breton, the poet and film director Jacques Prevert, who was to become one of the closest companions of his first years as an artist. Reunited in Paris in 1922, Tanguy and Prevert somehow kept alive on the scantiest of funds and pondered what careers to follow. Both had strong literary inclinations (throughout his life Tanguy read constantly), and both seem to have been elated by their discovery of the Comte de Lautreamont's book, Les Chants de Maldoror, later a central influence on the surrealist movement as a whole. But 1 anguy had begun to make sketches on scraps of paper and on the tablecloths and napkins of the Mont- parnasse cafes. These sketches attracted the attention of Maurice Vlaminck, one ol many painters whose connoisseurship may well have been more remarkable than his art, and at this point Tanguy thought of becoming an artist. His mind was made up one day in 1923 when, riding down the rue de La Boetie on a bus, he saw a painting in the window of Paul Guillaume's gallery. The picture was an early work by Giorgio de Chirico, now coupled with Tanguy in the present exhibition. Tanguy was so struck by the picture's enigmatic imagery that he jumped off the bus and ran over to examine it. On that day he determined to be himself a painter.