Yves Tanguy

Private Collection, Boston
Timothy Baum, New York
Bruce Clark, New York
Acquavella Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Seattle
Danese Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in January 2001

Executed on cream wove paper laid down on board. There are artist's pinholes to the lower two corners and there is a very thin border of mount-staining to all four extreme edges (not visible when framed). There is some very light medium rubbing to the upper part of the extreme right edge and a tiny paper loss to the centre of the extreme lower edge (neither of which are visible when framed). Otherwise, this work is in overall very good condition.
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American Composition exemplifies the exquisite and very distinctive pictorial language with which Tanguy transformed the boundaries of Modern painting. In 1925, Tanguy was invited by André Breton to become a member of the Surrealist group and in 1927 he opened his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Surréaliste in Paris. Though he never received any formal artistic training, his childhood summers spent at the coast near Finistère in Brittany, were to have a profound influence on his style. It was during these stays that Tanguy had observed prehistoric rock formations, objects floating on the water or washed up on the shore. These observations were the inspiration for the strange and abstract forms that populated the artist's eerie dreamscapes throughout his oeuvre. Another important influence on the artist was his trip to North Africa in 1930, where he observed natural geological structures and stratifications, once again drawing upon the natural world as inspiration.

When he executed the present work in 1943, Tanguy had recently arrived in New York and married the American Surrealist painter, Kay Sage. Artistically, it was an extremely fertile time for him and James Thrall Soby has remarked upon the particular splendour of the artist's output from this period: 'His color became more complex and varied, with extremes of light and dark replacing the relatively even tonality of his previous pictures. At the same time he made more and more frequent use of one of his most poetic inventions - the melting of land into sky, one image metamorphosed into another, as in the moving-picture technique known as lap-dissolve. The fixed horizon was now often replaced by a continuous and flowing treatment of space, and in many paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, it is extremely difficult to determine at what point earth becomes sky or whether objects rest on the ground or float aloft. The ambiguity is intensified by changes in the density of the objects themselves, from opaque to translucent to transparent, creating a spatial double entendre' (James Thrall Soby in Yves Tanguy (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955, pp. 17-18).

Tanguy's iconography occupies a unique position in the canon of Surrealist art. His intriguing forms are at once amorphous and tangible, mysterious and precise. The present work is a remarkable example of the artist's ability to make unrecognisable forms resonate with the viewer's subconscious. These strange abstract elements are Tanguy's own creation, yet there is something strangely familiar about them and and they are imbued with an undeniable universality. As Pierre Matisse commented in 1942, 'until Tanguy, the object, whatever external shocks it had undergone, remained in the last analysis a distinct prisoner of its own identity. With Tanguy we enter for the first time a world of total latency' (Pierre Matisse (ed.), Yves Tanguy. A summary of his works, New York, 1963, p. 16).