Yves Tanguy

Pierre Matisse, New York (acquired from the artist)

Private Collection (sold: Sotheby's, Paris, July 2, 2008, lot 40)

Acquired at the above sale

Pierre Matisse, Yves Tanguy, Un receuil de ses oeuvres, New York, 1963, no. 325, illustrated p. 148

Patrick Waldberg, Yves Tanguy, Brussels, 1977, illustrated p. 234

Painted in 1944 in the United States, where Tanguy had taken refuge at the beginning of the war, L'Oubli des nombres exemplifies Tanguy’s beguiling personal aesthetic. Populated with curious, biomorphic forms set against an enigmatic landscape, the work is a striking example of the artist’s mature style.  

A year after his arrival in the United States and his marriage to the artist Kay Sage, Tanguy and his new wife moved to Woodbury, Connecticut. Woodbury played host to a veritable colony of artists, including Alexander Calder, André Masson, Julien Levy and Arshile Gorky. Within this context of friendly artistic rivalry, interaction and influence, Tanguy further refined his distinctive form of Surrealism, producing some of his most important works. As James Thrall Soby describes: “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), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955, pp. 17-18).

The Pierre Matisse Gallery, which opened in New York in 1935, channeled these productive forces. In December 1939, Pierre Matisse – who was the first owner of the present work – seized the opportunity to organize a solo exhibition in Tanguy's honor and the following year he became his official art dealer in the United States. A few months after the first Tanguy exhibition in his adopted homeland, Pierre Matisse was moved to write: "He is a newcomer to the gallery and I will receive his entire output. You doubtless have seen a number of his paintings in Paris, but his recent work is truly remarkable and I'm convinced he will hold an important position among the painters of the post-war generation. His name is Tanguy [...]." (Pierre Matisse, cited in Pierre Matisse and His Artists, New York, 2002, p. 86).