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Lot Essay
Titre inconnu (Unknown Title) is a unique and highly important work that is the only known oil painting by Tanguy to have been made on glass. Painted in 1931, shortly after Tanguy had completed a series of large canvases in which his strange amorphic forms had revealed the influence of the rock formations he had seen in the Atlas mountains, on a visit to North Africa, this unique work embarks on the new direction that would determine much of the pattern of Tanguy's output throughout the 1930s.
Tanguy's decision to paint on glass, and on the front of the glass rather, than is the more usual practice of 'hintermalerei' or painting on the back, seems to have been prompted by a desire for an intensified fluidity and luminosity to his forms. Indeed, these are the most prominent qualities of this creation and also the distinguishing characteristics of much of the smaller scale, more intimate and poetic paintings he was to produce soon afterwards. In this work, Tanguy's endlessly striated background, extending from black at the bottom to a bright cream at the top and receding throughout like an ordered mist that establishes both a strange beauty and an eerie ambiguity, is made all the more powerful by the near luminosity that his paint attains on the glass ground. The strange world of Tanguy's mental landscapes becomes even stranger and somehow more precious thanks to this unique shift in medium.
Similarly, Tanguy's move to glass in this work, also seems to have encouraged him to break away from the rock-formation works that preceded this painting, as the scene depicted appears to represent a floating disintegration of such solid form. The large totemic central form, seeming to be rock at its base, has here given rise to a sequence of less solid and more globular forms apparently floating and drifting away from it in this ethereal realm of spatial ambiguity and low or non-existent gravity. This vaguely anthropomorphic form, casting its long de Chirico-esque shadow, echoes the kind of merger between figure and rock-formation that Salvador Dali - having been originally inspired by Tanguy's late 1920s paintings - was also developing in conjunction with the Catalan coastline near his home in Cadaqués at this time.
A kind of fusion between his earlier, darker undersea-type landscapes, and the more airy but earth-bound paintings inspired by the mountains of North Africa, this intimate, precious and fastidiously worked painting with its apparent image of floating disintegration, seems to mark therefore both a moment of transformation and a point of departure.
Tanguy's decision to paint on glass, and on the front of the glass rather, than is the more usual practice of 'hintermalerei' or painting on the back, seems to have been prompted by a desire for an intensified fluidity and luminosity to his forms. Indeed, these are the most prominent qualities of this creation and also the distinguishing characteristics of much of the smaller scale, more intimate and poetic paintings he was to produce soon afterwards. In this work, Tanguy's endlessly striated background, extending from black at the bottom to a bright cream at the top and receding throughout like an ordered mist that establishes both a strange beauty and an eerie ambiguity, is made all the more powerful by the near luminosity that his paint attains on the glass ground. The strange world of Tanguy's mental landscapes becomes even stranger and somehow more precious thanks to this unique shift in medium.
Similarly, Tanguy's move to glass in this work, also seems to have encouraged him to break away from the rock-formation works that preceded this painting, as the scene depicted appears to represent a floating disintegration of such solid form. The large totemic central form, seeming to be rock at its base, has here given rise to a sequence of less solid and more globular forms apparently floating and drifting away from it in this ethereal realm of spatial ambiguity and low or non-existent gravity. This vaguely anthropomorphic form, casting its long de Chirico-esque shadow, echoes the kind of merger between figure and rock-formation that Salvador Dali - having been originally inspired by Tanguy's late 1920s paintings - was also developing in conjunction with the Catalan coastline near his home in Cadaqués at this time.
A kind of fusion between his earlier, darker undersea-type landscapes, and the more airy but earth-bound paintings inspired by the mountains of North Africa, this intimate, precious and fastidiously worked painting with its apparent image of floating disintegration, seems to mark therefore both a moment of transformation and a point of departure.