Lot 3258* - A215 Impressionist & Modern Art - Friday, 28. November 2025, 04.30 PM
YVES TANGUY
(Paris 1900–1955 Waterbury)
Untitled. 1929.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated lower right: YVES TANGUY / 29.
50 × 65 cm.
Certificate:
Provenance:
- Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva (verso with label).
- Private collection, Germany.
Literature:
- Daniel Marchesseau: Yves Tanguy, Berlin 1974, p. 20 (illustrated).
Water, earth, and air blend into a boundless, atmospheric space, illuminated by a dim light and enriched by a few indistinct formal elements.
Some of Yves Tanguy's enigmatic, poetic imagery likely has its origins in his childhood and adolescence in Brittany. When he was eight, the death of his father—a captain who sailed the world's oceans—forced the boy to leave his mother and Paris to live with relatives on the Breton coast. He immersed himself in a previously unknown world full of legends, symbolic processions, and fantastic natural formations. In Finistère, at the "end of the world," the invisible and mystical are part of everyday life.
Shortly after the end of the First World War, Tanguy embarked on a merchant marine ship that took him across the seas for 18 months. His impressions also seem to have been an important inspiration to him as an artist who sought and discovered his own surrealist visual language.
The endless horizon lines and the languidly rolling plains of his works are reminiscent of coasts and beaches with large tides. The biomorphic figures and forms that populate his paintings recall flotsam and jetsam washed ashore at low tide.
Tanguy creates, in a sense, spiritual landscapes. The beach is ideal for this because it allows for infinitely wide perspectives, both formally and figuratively. The sea brings constant change and sudden interplay of color, light, and form—a perfect metaphor for the subconscious.
The present work is an early and fascinating example of Yves Tanguy's mysterious and illusionistic dream worlds.
Some of Yves Tanguy's enigmatic, poetic imagery likely has its origins in his childhood and adolescence in Brittany. When he was eight, the death of his father—a captain who sailed the world's oceans—forced the boy to leave his mother and Paris to live with relatives on the Breton coast. He immersed himself in a previously unknown world full of legends, symbolic processions, and fantastic natural formations. In Finistère, at the "end of the world," the invisible and mystical are part of everyday life.
Shortly after the end of the First World War, Tanguy embarked on a merchant marine ship that took him across the seas for 18 months. His impressions also seem to have been an important inspiration to him as an artist who sought and discovered his own surrealist visual language.
The endless horizon lines and the languidly rolling plains of his works are reminiscent of coasts and beaches with large tides. The biomorphic figures and forms that populate his paintings recall flotsam and jetsam washed ashore at low tide.
Tanguy creates, in a sense, spiritual landscapes. The beach is ideal for this because it allows for infinitely wide perspectives, both formally and figuratively. The sea brings constant change and sudden interplay of color, light, and form—a perfect metaphor for the subconscious.
The present work is an early and fascinating example of Yves Tanguy's mysterious and illusionistic dream worlds.
CHF 280 000 / 380 000 | (€ 288 660 / 391 750)
Sold for CHF 350 000 (including buyer’s premium)
All information is subject to change.