Yves Tanguy

Biography
1900 - 1955

About the artist

Yves Tanguy (1900, Paris – 1955, Waterbury, Connecticut, U.S.) was a French-born American surrealist painter.

In 1918, Tanguy briefly joined the merchant navy. At the end of his military service in 1922, Tanguy returned to Paris, where he began sketching in cafés. In 1923, seeing a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, he immediately decided to start painting. He joined the Surrealists in 1925, and thereafter he participated in all their major exhibitions. Around 1924 Tanguy was introduced by Prévert to the circle of surrealist artists around André Breton. In 1927, he gave his first solo exhibition in Paris, and married his first wife Jeannette Ducrocq. Like other Surrealist painters, Tanguy painted timeless, dreamlike landscapes, but his forms were completely invented, with no reference to reality. Tanguy visited the United States in 1939 and settled there. After he moved to the United States, he used a more colourful palette, and he gave the objects in his paintings a more metallic appearance. In 1940, Tanguy married for the second time, with the artist Kay Sage, in Reno, Nevada, U.S. Toward the end of the war, the couple moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, converting an old farmhouse into an artists' studio. They spent the rest of their lives there. Tanguy became a U.S. citizen in 1948. His paintings have a unique, immediately recognizable style of nonrepresentational surrealism.

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