Yves Tanguy

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Private Collection (sale: Christie’s, New York, An Important Private Collection of Works by Yves Tanguy, 10^th May 2001, lot 203)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Yves Tanguy, Paintings, Gouaches, Drawings, 1939, no. 10
San Francisco, Museum of Art, Yves Tanguy, 1940
Munich, Haus der Kunst & Paris, Museé des Arts Décoratifs, Der Surrealismus 1922-1942, 1972, no. 438 (in Munich), no. 423 (in Paris), illustrated in the catalogue
Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle & New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Yves Tanguy: A Retrospective, 1982-83, no. 78, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig & Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Klee, Tanguy, Miró: Tres Visions del Paisatge, 1999-2000, no. 46, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Kay Sage Tanguy et al., Yves Tanguy. Un Recueil de ses œuvres / A Summary of his Works, New York, 1963, no. 240, illustrated p. 114
Patrick Waldberg, Yves Tanguy, Brussels, 1977, illustrated in colour p. 183

Dating from 1939, J’avais déjà cet âge que j’ai belongs to a crucial year of Tanguy’s personal and artistic development, the year when he moved from France to America. Shortly after his arrival in New York, Kay Sage, whom the artist met in 1937, started promoting his work in the States. It was largely due to her efforts that Tanguy’s first major US retrospective, which included the present work, was held at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in September 1939. Shortly after the exhibition, Pierre Matisse, who had been Tanguy’s classmate at the Lycée Montaigne in Paris, became his exclusive representative in the United States.

Several months after the exhibition, Pierre Matisse wrote in a letter to a collector about Tanguy: ‘He is a new addition to the gallery, and I am getting his entire production. You have seen some of his pictures in Paris, I am sure, but the late work is really beautiful and I am convinced that he will have an important place among the painters of the post-war generation. His name is Tanguy […] I do know that he can paint and beautifully too’ (quoted in Pierre Matisse and His Artists (exhibition catalogue), The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 2002, p. 86).