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Lot Essay
It is currently the intention of the Yves Tanguy Committee to include this work in its forthcoming revised catalogue raisonné of the painter’s oils, watercolors and gouaches.
Tanguy shared with the great 15th century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch a taste for strange and inexplicable symbol-laden imagery, alchemical references, crowds of jostling figures, as well a careful precision in their rendering. A slow and meticulous craftsman, Tanguy loved objects that were beautifully made, and he imparted to the elements in his paintings the same care and convincing presence that a realist painter gives to a still life or landscape. These 'inscapes' of the mind, depicted here as a vast interior landscape of the imagination with indescribable protozoan inhabitants, seem balanced on the brink between order and chaos. '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,' Tanguy stated. 'I work very irregularly and by crises. Should I seek the reasons for my painting, I would feel that it would be a self-imprisonment' (quoted in 'The creative process', in Art Digest, New York, 15 January 1954, vol. 28, no. 8, p. 14).
Tanguy shared with the great 15th century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch a taste for strange and inexplicable symbol-laden imagery, alchemical references, crowds of jostling figures, as well a careful precision in their rendering. A slow and meticulous craftsman, Tanguy loved objects that were beautifully made, and he imparted to the elements in his paintings the same care and convincing presence that a realist painter gives to a still life or landscape. These 'inscapes' of the mind, depicted here as a vast interior landscape of the imagination with indescribable protozoan inhabitants, seem balanced on the brink between order and chaos. '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,' Tanguy stated. 'I work very irregularly and by crises. Should I seek the reasons for my painting, I would feel that it would be a self-imprisonment' (quoted in 'The creative process', in Art Digest, New York, 15 January 1954, vol. 28, no. 8, p. 14).