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Lot Essay
After a trip to North Africa with his wife in 1930, Yves Tanguy entered the mature phase of his oeuvre which evolved slowly and thoughtfully over the next twenty years. Waxing eloquent, the poet John Ashbury described Tanguy’s approach, saying, ‘What had been sketched and 'in the air' in the days of Dada and the early period of Surrealism began to assume, for Tanguy at any rate, the full contours, the rich mineral colours, the strong light and cast shadows, the space that while still ambiguous is now emphatically so, as though the landscape were a real one in which the laws of perspective had been suspended. Objects of a type never encountered yet obviously real are strung out on an infinite plain. They have the brightness of pebbles viewed under water. They communicate with each other, exist in relation to one another, sometimes are even attached to one another by thread or other bonds, and their relationships are strangely explicit though the protagonists themselves are of an unknown species’ (J. Ashbury, ‘Tanguy: The Geometer of Dreams,’ Yves Tanguy, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 1974).
Le lourd palais (The Heavy Palace) was painted in 1935 during the last years that Tanguy lived in Europe; ever prescient he immigrated to the United States in advance of the Second World War. Like the majority of the artist’s output from this period, Le lourd palais is the result of this almost entirely automatic technique in which Tanguy established a stark landscape and then gradually added nebulous, fluid forms and indecipherable geometries, each a prompt for the next. As André Breton, Tanguy’s great champion and confrère, noted, ‘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’ (A. Breton; ‘Yves Tanguy’ in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, London, 1965, pp. 178-9). Indeed, the present work seems to have emerged directly from a dream world, where skeletal shapes proliferate and tusks pierce the ground, in which sky and earth are united, and space is endless. This world is primordial, arcane, at once coherent and entirely impenetrable.
Le lourd palais was held in the collection of Édouard-Léon-Théodore Mesens, an important figure within the Surrealist movement. Born in Brussels, he was initially drawn to music, inspired in part by Erik Satie’s compositions. Mesens became a close friend of René Magritte, who he met in 1920, and the two helped to found the Surrealist group in Brussels. An ardent Surrealist, Mesens assisted with the organisation of the International Surrealist exhibition and later worked with Roland Penrose at the London Gallery. Throughout his life, Mesens collected, advanced, and promoted Surrealism, and his archive, held at The Getty Research Institute, contains extensive correspondence with artists and writers including Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Roland Penrose, and Tanguy.
Le lourd palais (The Heavy Palace) was painted in 1935 during the last years that Tanguy lived in Europe; ever prescient he immigrated to the United States in advance of the Second World War. Like the majority of the artist’s output from this period, Le lourd palais is the result of this almost entirely automatic technique in which Tanguy established a stark landscape and then gradually added nebulous, fluid forms and indecipherable geometries, each a prompt for the next. As André Breton, Tanguy’s great champion and confrère, noted, ‘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’ (A. Breton; ‘Yves Tanguy’ in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, London, 1965, pp. 178-9). Indeed, the present work seems to have emerged directly from a dream world, where skeletal shapes proliferate and tusks pierce the ground, in which sky and earth are united, and space is endless. This world is primordial, arcane, at once coherent and entirely impenetrable.
Le lourd palais was held in the collection of Édouard-Léon-Théodore Mesens, an important figure within the Surrealist movement. Born in Brussels, he was initially drawn to music, inspired in part by Erik Satie’s compositions. Mesens became a close friend of René Magritte, who he met in 1920, and the two helped to found the Surrealist group in Brussels. An ardent Surrealist, Mesens assisted with the organisation of the International Surrealist exhibition and later worked with Roland Penrose at the London Gallery. Throughout his life, Mesens collected, advanced, and promoted Surrealism, and his archive, held at The Getty Research Institute, contains extensive correspondence with artists and writers including Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Roland Penrose, and Tanguy.