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Lot Essay
The present intention of the Yves Tanguy Committee is to include this work in the revised edition of the catalogue raisonné of Yves Tanguy's paintings, gouaches and objects, under preparation by The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation.
Formerly in the collection of Simone Collinet, A force égale (Equal forces) is an exquisite abstract landscape created by Yves Tanguy in 1935. Simone Collinet was, along with her husband, André Breton, an important supporter and promoter of Tanguy’s work. Alongside Breton, she was a founder member and conscientious administrator of the fledgling Surrealist movement in the early 1920s, running, the office of the Surrealist movement for many years. After her separation and then divorce from Breton in 1931, Collinet continued to be an important presence within the history of Surrealism. In the aftermath of the Second World War she opened the gallery Artistes et Artisans on the rue de Seine in Paris and also ran the Galerie Furstenberg, exhibiting only Surrealist artists.
Like the majority of Tanguy’s paintings from this period, A force égale is the product of a near-automatic technique that Tanguy had developed in the late 1920s and then refined throughout the 1930s with increasing precision and attention to minuscule detail. The process was one in which an empty landscape often without a horizon was gradually added to by the artist who punctuated its enigmatic presence with a developing series of amorphous forms. Each of these forms was generated according to a sequence of spontaneous painterly impulses in which each individual shape came to serve as the prompt for the next until the composition as a whole felt complete.
As André Breton wrote of the unique pictorial language of the unconscious mind that paintings such as A force égale represent, ‘Before Tanguy, the object, despite the occasional exterior attacks to which it was subjected, remained, in the final analysis, distinct and imprisoned within its own identity. With Tanguy we enter for the first time into a world of total latency…Here, the elixir of life is decanted, leaving behind all the cloudy sediment of our ephemeral individual existences. The tide ebbs, revealing an endless shore where hitherto unknown composite shapes, creep, rear up, straddle the sand, sometimes sinking below the surface or soaring into the sky. They have no immediate equivalent in nature and it must be said that they have not as yet given rise to any valid interpretation.’ (André Breton; ‘Yves Tanguy’ in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, London, 1965, pp. 178-9)
Formerly in the collection of Simone Collinet, A force égale (Equal forces) is an exquisite abstract landscape created by Yves Tanguy in 1935. Simone Collinet was, along with her husband, André Breton, an important supporter and promoter of Tanguy’s work. Alongside Breton, she was a founder member and conscientious administrator of the fledgling Surrealist movement in the early 1920s, running, the office of the Surrealist movement for many years. After her separation and then divorce from Breton in 1931, Collinet continued to be an important presence within the history of Surrealism. In the aftermath of the Second World War she opened the gallery Artistes et Artisans on the rue de Seine in Paris and also ran the Galerie Furstenberg, exhibiting only Surrealist artists.
Like the majority of Tanguy’s paintings from this period, A force égale is the product of a near-automatic technique that Tanguy had developed in the late 1920s and then refined throughout the 1930s with increasing precision and attention to minuscule detail. The process was one in which an empty landscape often without a horizon was gradually added to by the artist who punctuated its enigmatic presence with a developing series of amorphous forms. Each of these forms was generated according to a sequence of spontaneous painterly impulses in which each individual shape came to serve as the prompt for the next until the composition as a whole felt complete.
As André Breton wrote of the unique pictorial language of the unconscious mind that paintings such as A force égale represent, ‘Before Tanguy, the object, despite the occasional exterior attacks to which it was subjected, remained, in the final analysis, distinct and imprisoned within its own identity. With Tanguy we enter for the first time into a world of total latency…Here, the elixir of life is decanted, leaving behind all the cloudy sediment of our ephemeral individual existences. The tide ebbs, revealing an endless shore where hitherto unknown composite shapes, creep, rear up, straddle the sand, sometimes sinking below the surface or soaring into the sky. They have no immediate equivalent in nature and it must be said that they have not as yet given rise to any valid interpretation.’ (André Breton; ‘Yves Tanguy’ in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, London, 1965, pp. 178-9)