The Long Rain, Yves Tanguy

Yves Tanguy (French, 1900–1955) The Long Rain, 1942 Oil on canvas Gift of the Friends of the Academy, 1943 (262.1) Yves Tanguy started painting in 1923 without any formal training, and by 1925 he had joined the Surrealist Movement. Today he is known for haunting dreamscapes such as this scene of a bleak, empty plain stretching toward a distant horizon and populated with irrational, vaguely biomorphic shapes. The harsh, hard-edged shadows cast by these disquieting forms seem to take on a life of their own, blatantly disregarding the distorting effects of the landscape or the clouded sky. Of all the Surrealists, Tanguy made the fewest references to the everyday world of the five senses, thus creating works that plumb the depths of the imagination and the subconscious mind.