Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy was born on January 5, 1900, in Paris. During the 1910s, while in high school, he met Pierre Matisse, who would later become his dealer. In 1918 he joined the Merchant Marine and traveled to Africa, South America, and England. In 1922, Tanguy returned to Paris, after his volunteer service in Tunis, and began sketching café scenes and working occasional jobs. After seeing a work by Giorgio De Chirico, in 1923 Tanguy started painting and was successively welcomed by André Breton into the Surrealist group in 1925. Despite his lack of formal training, Tanguy’s art developed relentlessly and his mature style emerged by the late 1920s. After first solo show in 1927 at the Galerie Surréaliste in Paris, Tanguy participated in numerous Surrealist group exhibitions. In 1939 he met the painter Kay Sage in Paris and later that year travelled with her to America, where they married in 1940 and settled in Woodbury, Connecticut. In 1942 Tanguy participated in the ‘Artists in Exile’ show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, where he exhibited until 1950. He became a United States citizen in 1948. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective of Tanguy’s work eight months after his death on January 15, 1955, in Woodbury.
Today his works are held in many major collections around the world, including: Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and The Tate gallery, London.
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