Yves Tanguy

Valentine Hugo, Paris
Galerie Gradiva, Paris
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired before 1982)
Private Collection, Paris
Sale: Phillips, New York, May 11, 2000, lot 24
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Jeanne Bucher-Myrbor, Yves Tanguy, 1938, n.n., illustrated in the catalogue
London, Guggenheim Jeune, Yves Tanguy, 1938, no. 13
Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle & New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Yves Tanguy, Retrospective 1925-1955, 1982-83, no. 51, illustrated in the catalogue

Patrick Waldberg, Yves Tanguy, Brussels, 1977, illustrated in color p. 279

The work is in very good condition. The panel is sound. There are a few scattered pindot nicks in the upper center, possibly inherent to the artist's process. Under UV light, there is a 5-inch vertical line of inpainting and some other very minor strokes in the upper right hand corner. There is a small area of inpainting in the extreme upper left corner, otherwise.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The present work, painted in 1932, contains many of the distinctive qualities that characterize Yves Tanguy’s signature "mind-scapes" and exemplifies the refined and personal language with which the artist transformed the boundaries of Modernist painting. Tanguy was invited by André Breton to become a member of the Surrealist group in 1925 and two years later he held his first one-man exhibition at Galerie Surréaliste in Paris. Tanguy recalled the particular preparation for his seminal exhibition: “Meanwhile…I had become a close friend of André Breton. He wrote the introduction to the catalog of my show. I remember spending a whole afternoon with him before the catalog went to press searching through books on psychiatry for statements of patients which we could use as titles for the paintings. The Museum’s painting Mama, Papa is Wounded! was one of them” (quoted in James Johnson Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans in America" in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. XIII, New York, 1946, nos. 4-5).

By the time of this exhibition in 1927 Tanguy was already a highly accomplished painter in complete command of a new and personal Surrealist idiom. Although he received no formal artistic training, his summers spent near Finistère in Brittany on the western coast of France were to have a profound influence on his style. It was during these stays that Tanguy had observed prehistoric rock formations and objects floating on the water or washed up on the shore, elements that, subjectively transformed, frequently appear in the dream world Tanguy celebrated.

Also important was his trip to North Africa in 1930, where he observed natural geological structures and stratifications. James Thrall Soby wrote of the particular splendor of the artist's works from the 1930s: "After his African voyage, Tanguy usually substituted mineral forms for the vegetal ones used in earlier works. 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 T. Soby in Yves Tanguy (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955, pp. 17-18).

Indeed, the present work, Roux en hiver, sees a deep foreground plane and ambiguous horizon in which objects, primal in form, silently float: they seem reliant upon objective reality and yet far removed from any specific reference. In this way, Tanguy’s pictorial forms are unique in the canon of Surrealist art: amorphous yet somehow recognizable to the viewer. With a refined sense of mystery, Tanguy presents in the current work a brilliant hyper-reality that embodies the aims of the Surrealist movement.



At this time it is the intention of the Tanguy Committee to include this work in the forthcoming revised Yves Tanguy Catalogue Raisonné.