Yves Tanguy was a French painter who taught himself to paint after seeing a canvas by Giorgio de Chirico in a Paris gallery window in 1923. He had no formal training. He joined the Surrealists the following year and became one of the movement's most distinctive voices — his dreamlike paintings filled with amorphous, bone-like forms on infinite flat plains. He moved to the United States in 1939 and never returned to France. He died in Connecticut in 1955. His work influenced a generation of American abstract painters without them quite being able to explain how.
January 5, 1900
126 years ago
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