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 artistic training whatsoever. Born on January 5, 1900, in the Ministry of the Marine building in Paris, where his father worked, Tanguy spent part of his youth in Brittany, whose rocky coastal landscapes would haunt his paintings for the rest of his life. He served in the French army and worked as a tramway operator before that encounter with de Chirico changed his direction entirely. He joined the Surrealist group the following year, becoming close with André Breton, and quickly developed one of the most distinctive visual vocabularies in the movement. His paintings depicted vast, barren planes stretching to infinite horizons, populated by smooth, bone-like, biomorphic forms that seemed to exist in some prehistoric or post-apocalyptic dreamscape. The landscapes had no recognizable geography, yet they felt hauntingly specific, as though they were memories of a place that existed just beyond conscious recall. Critics struggled to categorize the forms. They resembled organisms under a microscope, or eroded stones, or creatures from a world governed by different physics. Tanguy never explained them. He moved to the United States in 1939 with fellow Surrealist painter Kay Sage, whom he married, and settled in Woodbury, Connecticut. He became an American citizen in 1948. He never returned to France. His influence on the American Abstract Expressionists, particularly Arshile Gorky, is well documented but difficult to pin down precisely. He died on January 15, 1955, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Sage committed suicide five years later.