Yves Tanguy

“The relationships that bind forms together in nature cannot be pure chance, and what we call ‘natural life’ is in effect a relationship between forms, so inexorable that without it this natural life could not exist. So it is with art as well. The formal relationships within a work of art and among different works of art constitute an order for, and a metaphor of, the entire universe.”[i]

For many years while travelling I always carried a set of ink pens and a field sketchbook and close by a copy of a book of poems by Eugene Guillevec that had been translated by Denise Levertov. These poems were so vivid: extremely colorful, visual, imaginary. And solid. Perfect for a painter.

In her translations Levertov observed that Guillevic’s work was based on a “… simplicity of diction, the plain and hard meaning of things without descriptive qualification reverberates … with the ambiguity, the unfathomable mystery of natural objects.”[ii]

2surreal-1 — Georgia O’Keeffe
“Red and Pink Rocks and Teeth”
1938
Oil on canvas
21” x 13”
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O’Keeffe
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

During one summer several years ago on a visit to the Denver Art Museum it was clear that the curators had arranged a new hanging of the permanent collection featuring the addition of works not usually exhibited. It was there that I came upon a small still life by Kay Sage that brought to mind instantly another small still life, this one by Georgia O’Keeffe, that I had seen earlier in the year at the Art Institute of Chicago.

It is strange, even surreal one might say, how certain images might carry over a great distance and an expanse of time. I have admired, for a long time, the paintings of Kay Sage and Georgia O’Keeffe, finding a shared sensibility between these two women, which alerted me to another shared set of sensibilities between Guillevic and Tanguy, physical and spiritual elements both!

The paintings of Yves Tanguy and the poems of Eugene Guillevec show the influence of the Breton landscape in both abstract and physical ways. The formal and lyrical qualities depend greatly on the strange and surreal spirit of this place, the landscape of Brittany, while the litteral and figurative elements seem to depend on the clear observation and depiction of that landscape. Specific forms layed out in a specific space. Although I had always admired this element in Guillevic’s writing, it was also something that bothered me regarding Tanguy’s landscapes. Something overly stylized or self-consciously surreal.

1surreal-2 — Yves Tanguy
“Multiplication of the Arcs”
1954
Oil on canvas
40” x 60”
Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

“The form of the work of art is first, in the artist, a sort of conscious urge to produce a certain piece of work; his confused awareness of the work to be is already his awareness of its form. The making of beauty consists in the progressive information of a piece of freely chosen matter by the form present in the artist’s mind.”[iii]

Late in the summer of 2007 we visted both the Musee de Prehistoire and the galleries at the Hall de la Mairie de Carnac in Brittany, France. One was an exhibition of photographs of those many pre-historic sites that inhabit the Breton landscape. The other was a selection of writings by Guillevec exhibited alongside several paintings by contemporary artists. These included works by Marie Alloy, Jean-Jacques Dournon, and Julius Baltazar. In both cases it highlighted the importance of this ancient landscape, even on contemporary painters and poets. I have also discovered many of the nearby beaches, not on the sandy leeward sides of the land, but the ones on the windward sides, the rocky ones! And it was there that I saw the importance of Tanguy’s paintings: the balance that he maintained between the real and the surreal. And what Guillevec felt about the rocks and the sea, winds blowing in and out in contrary routes.

2surreal-3 — Richard Emery Nickolson
“The Beach near Le Pouldu, Brittany, France”
1997
Color photograph
Collection of the artist

“De la mer aux menhirs,
Des menhirs a la mer,
La meme route avec deux vents contraires
Et celui de la mer
Plein du meutre de l’autre.”

Guillevic[iv]

[i] Focillon, Henri; The Life of Forms in Art; Zone Books; New York, New York; 1992; p. 33.

[ii] Guillevic, Eugene; Translated by Denise Levertov; Guillevic: Selected Poems; New Directions Publishig Corporation; New York, New York; 1969; pp. viii-ix.

[iii] Gilson, Etienne; The Arts of the Beautiful; Dalkey Archive Press; Champaign, Illinois; 2000; p. 97.

[iv] Notes taken by this writer regarding poems written by Eugene Guillevic and posted in conjunction with the exhibition “Guillevic et les peintres” at the Hall de la Mairie de Carnac, Carnac, Brittany, France, 25 July 2007.

Yves Tanguy and Eugene Guillevic have often been described as ‘Druids’ in the 20th century worlds of painting and poetry.

As a youth in Locronan, Yves Tanguy would often watch a local painter named Toche at work, whose aim it was to capture the atmospheric qualities of the Breton landscape in a kind of half light. Eugene Guillevic was also influenced early on, first by the German poet Rilke and later by the French poet Trakl.

Yves Tanguy was born in 1900 on the Place de la Concorde in Paris and many childhood vacations were spent in his family home at Locronan in Finistere, Brittany where thousands of menhirs and dolmens have been scattered across the landscape since prehistoric times.

Tanguy was drafted into the Army in 1918 and returned to Paris at the end of his service in 1922. It was during this time period that he met two fellow artists, Jacques Prevert and Giorgio de Chirico. It was through these contacts that Tanguy became associated with Andre Breton and the Surrealist Group, from 1924 to 1938. Prior to World War II, he met and married the American artist Kay Sage and moved to New York and later established a studio in Woodberry, Connecticut. Tanguy died in Connecticut in 1955.

1surreal-1 — Kay Sage
“A Little Later”
1938
Oil on canvas
36” x 28”
Denver Art Museum, Denver Colorado

Eugene Guillevic was born in Carnac, Morbihan, Brittany in 1907. He began writing poetry as a child, inspired primarily by the Fables of La Fontaine. Upon passing his baccalaureate in 1926 he was assigned a series of governmental positions including as Inspecteur d’Economie National from 1946 to 1963.

His work developed through the Surrealist period and into a more personal simplicity and maturity later in his life. He received Le Grand Prix de Poesie from the French Academy in 1976 and Le Grand Prix National de Poesie in 1984. Guillevic died in 1997.

In her book of translations of selected Guillevic poems, the poet Denise Levertov observed that: “The great ritual places of the Celts . . . the places where the great and small stones or menhirs, are gathered in powerful and enigmatic testimony to forgotten certainties, are landscapes of a profound austerity.”[i]

“The Rocks”

“The rocks won’t know
one speaks about them.

And always to sustain them, they’ll have
only grandeur. . . .”

“They don’t burn sulphur
in the darkness

for they have never known
the fear of death. . . .”

“And then the joy

of knowing the menace
and enduring.

While at their edges
bits of stone flake off

which wind and wave had scraped at
while they were dozing.”

“. . . They don’t have to go about
With faces you can read like books.”

“They did not want to be the temple
in which to delight. . . .”

“And joy
comes to them out of themselves alone. . . .”

“It happens that a block of stone
detaches itself and falls,

falls so that one misses a breath,
into the wet sea. . . .”

“. . . To be the memory of a rock, of being
promontory, out and towards the wave.”[ii]

[i] Guillevic, Eugene; Translated by Denise Levertov; Guillevic: Selected Poems; New Directions Publishig Corporation; New York, New York; 1969; p. vii.

[ii] Guillevic, Eugene; Translated by Denise Levertov; Guillevic: Selected Poems; pp. 76-83.

BRIDGING THE GAP

Reflections on the plastic and ekphrastic traditions

THE SURREALISTIC DRUIDS: PART TWO

THE SURREALISTIC DRUIDS: PART ONE