Tag Archives: andré breton

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Leonora Carrington, Green Tea

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leonora carrington green tea photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

During World War II, after the imprisonment of then partner, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington fled France and sought asylum in Spain. There, she experienced a series of psychological crises. Her family placed her in a sanatorium against her will, where she was subjected to severe treatments. Carrington eventually moved to New York, where Andre Breton encouraged you to write about her experiences in the Surrealist  journal VVV.
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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Extinction of Useless Lights By Yves Tanguy

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yves tanguy extinction of useless lights photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Let’s take a look at a painting that feels less like a traditional artwork and more like a window into a dream. Created by French Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, Extinction of Useless Lights (1927) invites viewers into a mysterious landscape where logic takes a back seat and imagination takes the wheel.

Tanguy was a key figure in Surrealism, which explored dreams, the subconscious, and the strange imagery that exists beyond everyday reality. Interestingly, he was largely self-taught as an artist. After encountering the ideas of Surrealist leader André Breton in the 1920s, Tanguy quickly developed a visual style that would become unmistakably his own. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Extinction of Useless Lights By Yves Tanguy →

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Yves Tanguy, My Life, Black and White

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yves tanguy my life black and white photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Interlocking organic shapes of dull and sharp appendages support one another like a monument in the characteristic space of Yves Tanguy’s  My Life, Black and White (1944).  Having met the poet Andre Breton in 1925, Tanguy remained true to the Surrealist movement throughout his work, borrowing shapes and motifs from Jean Arp and Joan Miro.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Kurt Seligmann, Magnetic Mountain

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Magnetic Mountain
Photo By Gail

After Kurt Seligmann (1900 – 1962) settled in Paris, his sinister, biomorphic compositions gained the attention of Andre Breton, who invited him to join the Surrealist group in 1937. With the outbreak of World War II, Seligmann became the first Surrealist to arrive in New York, and he was instrumental in the emigration of most of the movement’s leading figures.
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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Yves Tanguy, He Did What He Wanted

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He Did What He Wanted
Photo By Gail

He Did What He Wanted (1927) was included in Yves Tanguy’s first solo show at the Galerie Surréaliste, Paris, in 1927. Before the exhibition opened, Tanguy and Surrealist leader André Breton invented titles for the paintings based on a 1922 book called Treaty of Metapsychics by Charles Richet, a Nobel Prize winner for medicine, which explored mysterious forms of cognition — a subject that resonated with the Surrealist interest in the unconscious and in dream states. The title of this work refers to a phenomenon Richet describes in which hypnotized subjects refuse to obey external commands. In early works, such as this one, Tanguy defined his signature style: a vaguely geological, otherworldly terrain strewn with symbols and enigmatic creatures. His biomorphic forms, rendered with a painterly treatment of surface that approaches abstraction, had a profound impact on postwar painters such as Matta and Arshile Gorky.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.