1926

The Storm (Black Landscape)

American (born France), 1900 - 1955

In The Storm (Black Landscape), a faint horizon line turns a somber picture field into a dark, dramatic vista. Yves Tanguy fills it with enigmatic forms. Some of these forms are loosely vegetable, animal, or mineral, but others cannot be directly related to any known type of entity. Some are tangible, others wraithlike. The ascending rhythm of feathery plumes of smoke and rising clouds imbues the space with a floating feeling. Tanguy became a painter of landscapes of the imagination, the main subject of his life’s work, soon after joining the Paris Surrealist group in 1925. He claimed that his paintings came to him like visions—an idea that put the artist in line with the Surrealist principle of automatism, meaning creative activity occurring without intentional control or reasoning, to express subconscious feelings such as foreboding or desire.