Yves Tanguy valuation
Self-taught Surrealist of empty plains and smooth, bone-like forms, who left Paris for Connecticut.
Yves Tanguy was born in Paris in 1900 to Breton parents and spent much of his childhood at Locronan in Finistère.
What a work by Yves Tanguy is worth
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Bio
Yves Tanguy was born in Paris in 1900 to Breton parents and spent much of his childhood at Locronan in Finistère. He joined the merchant navy in 1918 and was then called up into the army, where he became friends with Jacques Prévert. He decided to paint after seeing a picture by Giorgio de Chirico in a dealer's window, and had no training. Prévert brought him into André Breton's circle around 1924, and he held his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1927. In 1938 he met the American painter Kay Sage; he followed her to New York when war broke out, married her in 1940 and settled at Woodbury, Connecticut. He died there in 1955, and Pierre Matisse later scattered his ashes, with Sage's, at Douarnenez.
The paintings are variations on one world: a shelving ground or seabed under a graded sky, scattered with hard-edged shapes that cast long shadows. He painted slowly, the output is modest and many of the best pictures are in museums, so gouaches and drawings appear more often than oils. After his death Kay Sage compiled a catalogue of his paintings, gouaches and objects, published by Pierre Matisse in 1963, and a work's place in it, with its exhibition history, is the first thing to establish.
Mama, Papa is Wounded!, Guggenheim Jeune and Woodbury
Mama, Papa is Wounded!, of 1927, is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Tanguy said he found titles like it in psychiatric textbooks he leafed through with Breton.
In 1938 Peggy Guggenheim gave him his first exhibition in Britain, at her London gallery Guggenheim Jeune, and bought two pictures from it. His way of painting fed into the work of Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Toyen and Esteban Francés.
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