Three years from the easel to a museum wall
The picture moved from Tanguy’s studio into a public collection unusually fast. Painted in 1942, it passed through his New York dealer, the Pierre Matisse Gallery (run by Pierre Matisse, a son of the painter Henri Matisse, and the main channel for Tanguy’s American work), and on June 22, 1945 it was sold to the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, through the museum’s Room of Contemporary Art Fund (accession RCA1945:2). That is the whole provenance, the documented chain of who has owned a work in order: artist, dealer, museum, in three short years, with the painting never passing through a private collector at all.
One thing to keep straight is that the museum has changed its name twice since, which can make a single picture look as if it has lived in three places. At the 1945 purchase it was the Albright Art Gallery; for decades after it was the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; and since a renovation and reopening in 2023 it has been the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. One institution, three names, one wall. Indefinite Divisibility has hung in it, under one name or another, ever since 1945.
A nowhere that became a cliché
The picture’s real afterlife is not in its ownership but in how thoroughly its world got absorbed. The Tanguy formula (a smooth, invented, solid-looking object sitting on an empty, evenly lit plain under a high horizon) became a template for illusionistic Surrealism, alongside the Dalí and Magritte vein the break draws on, and, after that, a current in a century of fantastic and science-fiction imagery: airless alien deserts, biomorphic shapes that look organic and are nothing, dream-plains rendered with hard, convincing finish. That image is so familiar now it can be hard to see as an invention. It is a cliché precisely because Tanguy made it convincing first, and made it stick.
A note on why this picture is shown small here. It is still under copyright: Tanguy painted it in 1942 and died in 1955, and the rights are actively held (© Estate of Yves Tanguy / Artists Rights Society, New York). So unlike the older paintings in these readings, which have passed into the public domain, this one is reproduced small and credited, for the purpose of talking about it. The invented world is free to roam an endless desert; the picture of it is not quite free in the same way.