© Estate of Yves Tanguy / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Currently not on view
Construction 2036,
1949
This drawing combines Tanguy’s skeletal forms with collaged elements. The spindly figures on the right, one with a compartment containing breast-like appendages, seem to reach toward the black paper shape with a mechanical proboscis. To generate his stylized forms, Tanguy adopted the Surrealist method of automatism, allowing one form or motif to suggest the next rather than planning compositions in advance, a technique that embraced the irrational and rebuked bourgeois values—which Tanguy and his fellow Surrealists believed had paved the way for both world wars. Encouraged by his soon-to-be wife, Kay Sage, Tanguy emigrated from Paris to New York in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. Two years later, Sage and Tanguy moved to Connecticut, where their friends and neighbors were Alexander Calder and his family. The three artists are reunited in this gallery.
Information
1949
- "Summary of Acquisitions, 1963," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, vol. 23, no. 1 (1964): p. 29-31., p. 30
- 19th and 20th century French drawings from the Art Museum, Princeton University: an introduction, (Princeton, NJ: Distributed by Princeton University Press, 1972)., pp. 54, 90, cat. no. 14; p. 55 (illus.)
