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Artist or Maker: Yves Tanguy (1900-1955)

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Provenance: Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.
Hugh Chisholm, by 1945.
Richard Feigen Gallery, New York (no. 12408-D).
Mr and Mrs Harold X. Weinstein, Chicago, by whom acquired from the above by 1961.
Private collection, by whom acquired from the above through the agency of Galleria Galatea, Turin (no. 1837) in 1967.
Private collection, Switzerland, by whom acquired from the above through the agency of Galleria Galatea in 1971.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

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Exhibited: New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Yves Tanguy, May - June 1945, no. 157.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Yves Tanguy, a retrospective exhibition, September - October 1955 (loan no. 1680).
Chicago, Art Institute, 1961, no. 155.
Turin, Galleria Galatea, Yves Tanguy, April - May 1971 (illustrated).

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Literature: 'Eleven Europeans in America', interview by J.J. Sweeney in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. XIII, no. 4-5, 1946.
A. Breton & M. Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, New York, 1946, p. 25 (illustrated).
P. Matisse, Yves Tanguy, New York, 1963, no. 327 (illustrated p. 150).
P. Waldberg, Yves Tanguy, Brussels, 1977 (illustrated p. 71).
Exh. cat.,Yves Tanguy Rétrospective 1925-1955, Paris, 1982 (illustrated p. 221).
Exh. cat.,Yves Tanguy Retrospektive 1925-1955, Munich, 1982 (illustrated p. 89).

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Notes: One of Tanguy's largest paintings and one of only two works of this scale left in private hands, Les derniers jours (The Last Days) is also one of the most important paintings that the artist made during his first years living in exile in the United States. Painted towards the end of the second World War in 1944 - the year that Allied forces finally began the liberation of Europe, freeing Tanguy's beloved city of Paris in August - the dramatic title of this work is both poignant and timely. The majority of the usually enigmatic and often curious titles that Tanguy gave to his paintings were prompted by the specific ambience generated by the work in question. Tanguy's working method was such that very little was ever pre-meditated. Working intuitively from one form to the next Tanguy sought to be constantly 'surprised' by the forms his painting took. His titles were often deliberately enigmatic points of conclusion to the mysterious pictorial journey of discovery he embarked on in each work. During Tanguy's first years in America however, the dramatic events taking place in Europe were never far from the artist's mind and inevitably came to play a significant role in determining the mood of many of his paintings. The sense of finality and of expectation expressed in the title of this work strikes a knowing balance between the work and the sombre climate of the time. It is equally applicable to the dramatic events in Europe and to the atmosphere of monumentality and heavy archaic grandeur that emanates from fog-covered sky and the cluster of bizarre monuments dominating this large-scale and imposing work.

Exhibiting a density and gravitas far beyond anything Tanguy had produced in the 1920s and 30s, Les derniers jours is a powerful example of the significant change that had taken place in his work since moving to the United States in November 1939. Although Tanguy altered neither his painterly style nor his working method, continuing to painstakingly build the forms of his mysterious landscapes intuitively piece by piece, in America his visions grew in both scope, stature and complexity. The strict and dominant horizontality of his psychological landscapes continued, but his archetypal, dolmen-like monoliths and constructions grew more dense and complex, and increasingly came to dominate and obscure the immediate foreground of his paintings. Most dramatic however, as Tanguy himself observed, was the change in his palette. In an interview he gave to James Johnson Sweeney of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1946 for an exhibition catalogue in which Les derniers jours was used as the leading image (see fig), Tanguy remarked on this recant change in his work, commenting: 'Here in the United States the only change I can distinguish in my work is possibly in my palette. What the cause of this intensification of colour is I can't say. But I do recognise a considerable change. Perhaps it is due to the light. I also have a feeling of greater space here - more 'room'. But that was why I came' (Yves Tanguy in exh. cat. Eleven European Artists, The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 13, nos. 4-5 (interview with J.J. Sweeney 1946), p. 22f).

After originally living in New York, Tanguy and his wife Kay Sage had moved to Woodbury Connecticut, where, alongside other artist friends in the neighbourhood such as Alexander Calder, André Masson, David Hare and Arshille Gorky they settled into a more rural and peaceful existence. Tanguy's former schoolfriend Pierre Matisse, who now ran an important gallery of avant-garde art in New York, gave Tanguy a contract with his gallery and a monthly stipend in return for one painting a month. This position of relative security, along with Tanguy's sense of rural isolation in Woodbury, may have led to the growth and change in his art during this time. Far less erratic than the Tanguy of old who had often patrolled the streets and cafés of Paris with a reckless sense of wild abandon and painted only when it appealed to him, in America he settled into a consolidated routine of creativity that involved a daily practice of painting.

In conjunction with his wife, the artist Kay Sage, the couple began a practice of working from each morning to the early afternoon when they would round off the day with a review of each other's work and, what was for Tanguy, an almost obligatory series of martinis. The new crystal clear light and sharp definition of form that appears in Tanguy's art at this time may in fact, reflect the strong, clear and often sharply angular forms of Sage's art. At the same time, the increased clarity in Tanguy's rendition could also be a response by the artist to his new environment. Abandoning the anthropomorphism so apparent in his earlier forms and constructions, the assemblage of forms that Tanguy produced in America became more stone-like, more monumental and more invoking of an archetypal sense of ancient history. Some observers have argued that this change in the formation of his abstract landscape conglomeration of forms reflects, (like Max Ernst's decalcomania paintings of the same period), the influence of the rock formations Tanguy had seen in the American West in the summer of 1940. Between 1930 and 1931 Tanguy had been profoundly influenced by the rock formations and vast sense of space that he had witnessed in the Atlas mountains while on a trip to Morocco. It is possible that the increased density and magnitude of his American paintings were provoked by a similar response to the American landscape, but, underlying all Tanguy's work is also a strong and pervasive sense of the ancient landscape of his native Brittany. This is particularly the case in Les derniers jours in which the strong heavy stone-like conglomeration of forms recall the dense, ancient and mysterious atmosphere of the vast stone megaliths of Carnac on the Breton coast.

Set against a bizarre and mysterious foggy grey sky, the curious forms of Les derniers jours combine to form an alien panorama of such intensity that the expectation that something epic or profound is about to happen is acute. With its colourful stone-like forms seeming to radiate signals in correspondence with the turbulent fog-covered sky, the sense of tremulous finality is almost overpowering. Executed at a time when the war in Europe was, after five years, heading towards a close, it is hard not to see this large-scale work as a timely portrait of the closing of an epoch. Like Ernst's great and prophetic decalcomania masterpiece Europe After the Rain of 1940-42, Tanguy's Les derniers jours is also a formidable mental landscape that asserts itself in the mind of the viewer as a powerful and convincing psychological portrait of the homeland (Europe) in the aftermath of the war.

Tanguy only painted four other canvases on this large scale, of which only one (Ennui et tranquilité, 1938) remains in private hands. The others are The Palace of Windowed Rocks, 1942 (Musée National d'Art Moderne de Paris), Fear II, 1949 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and Multiplication of the Arcs, 1954 (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

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