1. In 1918, Yves Tanguy briefly joined the merchant navy before being drafted into the Army, where he befriended Jacques Prevert.
18 Facts About Yves Tanguy
1. 2.
Yves Tanguy stumbled upon a painting by Giorgio de Chirico and was so deeply impressed he resolved to become a painter himself in spite of his complete lack of formal training.
3.
Yves Tanguy had a habit of being completely absorbed by the current painting he was working on.
4.
Yves Tanguy had an intense affair with Peggy Guggenheim in 1938 when he went to London with his wife Jeannette Ducrocq to hang his first retrospective exhibition in Britain at her gallery Guggenheim Jeune.
5.
The exhibition was a great success and Guggenheim wrote in her autobiography that "Yves Tanguy found himself rich for the first time in his life".
6.
Yves Tanguy purchased his pictures Toilette de L'Air and The Sun in Its Jewel Case for her collection.
7.
The affair continued in both London and Paris and only finished when Yves Tanguy met a fellow Surrealist artist who would become his second wife.
8.
In 1938, after seeing the work of fellow artist Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy began a relationship which led to his second marriage.
9.
Yves Tanguy would spend the rest of his life in the United States.
10.
Sage and Yves Tanguy were married in Reno, Nevada, on August 17,1940.
11.
In January 1955, Yves Tanguy suffered a fatal stroke at Woodbury.
12.
Yves Tanguy's body was cremated and his ashes preserved until Sage's death in 1963.
13.
Yves Tanguy's paintings have a unique, immediately recognizable style of nonrepresentational Surrealism.
14.
Yves Tanguy said that it was an image he saw entirely in his imagination before starting to paint it.
15.
Yves Tanguy's style was an important influence on several younger painters, such as Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Toyen, and Esteban Frances, who adopted a Surrealist style in the 1930s.
16.
Later, Yves Tanguy's paintings influenced the style of the 1980 French animated movie Le Roi et l'oiseau, by Paul Grimault and Prevert.
17.
Yves Tanguy's works influenced the science fiction cover art of illustrator Richard Powers.
18.
Yves Tanguy's The Invisibles was a key plot point in the third episode of the second series of BBC Two comedy-drama There She Goes.