Mysterious organic forms animate the canvas and seem to evoke the enigmatic processes brought into being by Hieronymus Bosch in his works. 

Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy, a French Surrealist painter who obtained American citizenship, was born on 5 January 1900 at the Ministère de la Marine in Place de la Concorde, Paris, where his father, an official, lived. Both his parents were Bretons and that place of origin provided the artist with an endless source of inspiration, a lost dimension evoked throughout the course of his entire career. 

At the end of his military service, which he served near Nancy, in eastern France, Tanguy returned to Paris, where he revived his friendship with Jacques Prévert, whom he had met in the army. It was during this time that he also became acquainted with Marcel Duhamel. The trio, who were destined to leave a huge mark on 20th-century culture (Prévert became a famous poet and playwright; Duhamel an acclaimed dramatist, actor and translator) shared an apartment at 54 Rue du Château, behind Gare Montparnasse, from 1923 to 1928. Their home soon became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals. 

The Surrealists were frequent visitors and it was in that legendary dwelling that the famous cadavre exquis game was created in 1925. To cite the art critic Patrick Waldberg, the house at 54 Rue du Château was a boat whose dreamy crew sailed every day in deep waters, steering a ship in which non-conformism, liberty and creative invention reigned supreme, in a completely unparalleled fashion.¹ 

His encounter with the Metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico took place in 1923 and represented something of a lightning strike. Tanguy not only threw himself off a tram in his hurry to admire the painting Le Cerveau de l’enfant (The Child’s Brain, 1914, Stockholm, Moderna Museet), which lit up the window of Paul Guillaume’s gallery with its unprecedented style, but he also decided to devote himself entirely to painting following that unexpected and violent vision.² 

Two years later he met André Breton, a forerunner of the Surrealist avantgarde. It was a meeting packed with significance and full of consequences. At least until his departure for the United States in 1939, the two continued to be great friends and faithful collaborators. Thanks to Breton’s influence, the painter’s fame spread beyond French borders and his works were recognised as being some of the finest examples of Surrealism. 

In 1927, Tanguy’s already mature style allowed him to hold his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Surréaliste in Paris. The preface to the catalogue was written by Breton, as were the notes on the painter, published the following year in Le surréalisme et la peinture. In the writer’s words, Tanguy’s metamorphic images were placed: 

“At the limits where the spirit rejects all external aid and man no longer wants to draw argument except from his existence, in this field of pure forms to which any meditation on painting introduces us, where the ball of feathers weighs as much as that of lead, where everything can take flight and escape, where the most contrary things meet and clash without leading to catastrophe.”³ 

Breton concluded his considerations with the poetic metaphor of the insect and leaf: “The idea of the three kingdoms is, moreover, total nonsense. If an orthoptera alights upon a branch, who can say whether or not any leaf will fly away from the tree in its stead?”⁴ Once again, camouflage, an interest in the social life of insects and an approach to science that overlooked the prevalent anthropocentric attitude (cat. p. 786) were the key through which to interpret the production of many Surrealist artists. At the outbreak of World War II, Tanguy was one of the first to leave for the United States. It was there that he married Kay Sage, a well-to-do American painter and former Princess of San Faustino (from her previous marriage to an Italian aristocrat), who helped him emigrate from France at the outbreak of World War II and helped arrange an exhibition for him at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Under contract with Pierre Matisse, he experienced far greater financial affluence and recognition than he had in his home country. The sale of canvases to collectors and museums, the interest demonstrated by critics and curators, the inspiration deriving from the fiery city of New York and the vast wealth of landscapes in the North American continent, created extremely favourable conditions for his work.⁵ 

Lorsqu’on verra (When One will See), which dates to that season of fruitful renewal, features a landscape with an elevated horizon line and a deep foreground. Mysterious organic forms animate the canvas and seem to evoke the enigmatic processes brought into being by Hieronymus Bosch in his works. The imagination of the Dutch artist, who was profoundly influenced by Rosicrucian symbology, shares a surprising blend of lucidity and mystery with the work of Tanguy, capable of endowing the scene with that peculiar characteristic of a vivid dream.⁶ This ambiguity is amplified by the title of the work, which is openly removed from the content of the vision, in keeping with a modus operandi implemented since the very start of his career.⁷ 

Influenced by the light of the new continent and by its immense spaces, his palette became filled with colour.⁸ The long shadows, typical of de Chirico’s Metaphysical painting, anchor the shapes to the evanescent background. During his American period, the figures lose their biomorphic appearance and start to resemble agglomerates produced by the hand of man, with their skin recalling the surface of plastic materials. It is no coincidence that nylon and PET (polyethylene terephthalate) were patented during this period, with both materials literally going on to inundate industrial production in the post-war period. 

In 1942, the canvas featured in his second solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. After several changes of ownership in the United States, the work reached the European market in the mid-1970s. Francesco Federico Cerruti purchased it prior to 1993, the year when it was recorded in the handwritten inventory of his villa in Rivoli.⁹ 

Fabio Cafagna

¹ Waldberg 1962, p. 52.

² J. Pierre, “Le peintre surréaliste par excellence”, in Paris-Baden Baden 1982, pp. 43-44.

³ Breton 2010, pp. 63-64.

⁴ Ibid., p. 64.

⁵ M. Sawin, “1940-55. Les annés américaines”, in Le Bihan, Mabin, Sawin 2001, pp. 132-217.

⁶ R. Penrose, “Yves Tanguy”, in Paris-Baden 1982, p. 27.

⁷ From the interview by Sweeney 1946, pp. 22, 23.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ A precise terminus ante quem is provided by the handwritten “Inventario dei mobili, dipinti, sculture, argenti, tappeti, maioliche, porcellane e oggetti d’arte che si trovano nella villa di Rivoli alla data del 30-06-1993”, in which the work is mentioned in the area of the vestibule and stairs (Cerruti Collection Archives).