YVES TANGUY | Composition

Marcel Duchamp, New York (acquired from the artist) Maria Martins, Brazil

Harold Diamond, New York

Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne

Richard Dreyfus, Basel (acquired from the above in 1969)

Sale: Christie's, London, 28th June 1983, lot 223

Richard Feigen & Co., New York

Private Collection, New York (sold: Sotheby's, London, 29th June 1994, lot 257)

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Sète, Musée Paul Valéry, Deux visions du surréalisme, 2016, no. 56, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

René Le Bihan, Renée Mabin & Martica Sawin, Yves Tanguy, Quimper, 2001, no. 109, illustrated in colour p. 190 (with incorrect medium)

The haunting imagery of Yves Tanguy's works stems from his experience growing up in Northern France during the First World War. Dilapidated buildings, piles of rubble and the bleak terrain of abandoned battlefields were common sights throughout northern France. Tanguy’s summers in Brittany provided further inspiration, with the region’s characteristic prehistoric rock formations often appearing in his dreamlike landscapes. These spectacles had a significant effect on Surrealist imagery, particularly for Tanguy, whose landscapes capture ‘the sense of empty, abandoned, ghostly wasteland of the war-torn terrain’ (Sidra Stich in Anxious Visions, Surrealist Art (exhibition catalogue), University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, 1990, p. 87).

A slow and scrupulous craftsman, Tanguy paid meticulous attention to his seemingly sparse compositions. He depicts the ‘inscapes’ of the mind, represented here as a vast landscape of the imagination with indecipherable protozoan inhabitants, seemingly balanced on the brink between order and chaos. Tanguy wrote: ‘The element of surprise in the creation of a work of art is, to me, the most important factor - surprise to the artist himself as well as to others. I work very irregularly and by crises. Should I see the reasons for my painting, I would feel that it would be a self-imprisonment' (Yves Tanguy quoted in ‘The creative process’ in Art Digest, vol. 28, New York, 15th January 1954, p. 14).

Composition was first owned by Marcel Duchamp, who by 1950 had gained international fame as a pioneer of Conceptual Art through celebrated works such as Fountain and Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp and Tanguy were both at the forefront of the Parisian and American avant-garde. This artistic collaboration was showcased by Tanguy’s participation in Le Surréalisme en 1947, an exhibition organised by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp at Galerie Maeght in Paris. 

It is the current intention of the Yves Tanguy Committee to include this work in the forthcoming revised Catalogue raisonné under preparation by the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation.