Un grand tableau qui représente un paysage

Infused with a deep sense of mystery, Un grand tableau qui représente un paysage is a powerful early example of Yves Tanguy’s great series of enigmatic, Surrealist landscapes. Painted in 1927, it emerged during one of the most intensive and productive periods of the artist’s career, as he delved into the recesses of his imagination and experimented with a near-automatic technique, arriving at the mature style that he would become renowned for. After first delineating a background landscape whose hazy colors and forms would articulate the mood of the picture, the painting would then be left to dry for a day or so, during which time the artist ruminated upon the shapes before him, contemplating the potential direction of the composition. Tanguy would then instinctively begin to populate the canvas with a series of intuitively arrived-at forms, modelled and shaped by spur of the moment decisions. “The element of surprise in the creation of a work of art is, to me, the most important factor,” he later explained. “The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand” (“The Creative Process,” in Art Digest, vol. 28, no. 8, 1954, p. 14). 
Having grown up in Locronan, in the Finistère province in far west Brittany, Tanguy’s dreams of the marvelous had always revolved around and been inspired by the sea, which remained in his imagination an undeniable and ever-present manifestation of the great unknown. During the 1920s, the artist returned to this familiar landscape, spending a number of weeks each summer exploring the coastline extensively, making excursions to nearby peninsulas with rugged cliffs, and visiting the myriad Neolithic monuments that were scattered throughout the surrounding environment. These visits exerted a growing influence on his paintings from 1926 onwards, resulting in hallucinatory visions that he conjured from the depths of his subconscious, but which retained a clear affinity with the sea. In Un grand tableau qui représente un paysage the color palette is particularly suggestive of a wild, rugged coastal scene, its richly variegated blue-grey tones invoking the depths of the ocean. The deep foreground plane appears as a sandy expanse, undulating towards the shoreline, while a large stone monolith occupies the left hand side of the scene, its sheer face suggesting a cliff, a sea-stack, or an ancient menhir. A host of strange, phantasmagorical figures and forms are dotted throughout the scene, lit by an unseen source that causes strong, silhouetted shadows to fall over the ground, while wispy tendrils appear to float upwards, like clusters of seaweed caught in the breeze.
Un grand tableau qui représente un paysage was included in Tanguy’s inaugural solo-exhibition, Yves Tanguy et Objets d’Amérique at the Galerie Surréaliste in Paris from May to June, 1927. In his preface to the exhibition, André Breton praised the new direction within the artist’s oeuvre explaining that it “allows him to venture as far as he wants and to give us images of the unknown…” (Yves Tanguy et Objets d’Amérique, exh. cat., Galerie surréaliste, Paris, 1927). The painting was purchased shortly after the exhibition by Henri Hoppenot and his wife, Helena, and remained in their collection for the following three decades. While visiting a group exhibition in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s Tanguy encountered Hoppenot, who was by then a high-ranking diplomat, serving as French Ambassador to the UN Security Council. Hoppenot invited Tanguy to the ambassador’s residence to see Un grand tableau qui représente un paysage in person, an offer Tanguy happily accepted, proclaiming that he found it “a fantastic experience to see one of my children again after twenty-five years” (quoted in K. Von Maur, ed., Yves Tanguy and Surrealism, exh. cat., The Menil Collection, Houston, 2001, p. 125).