One invented world, painted over and over

Yves Tanguy (1900–1955) built a single world and spent his life painting it. It is always the same place: a vast, deserted plain that recedes to a high horizon, scattered with smooth, pale objects that look like bone or stone or polished metal and resemble nothing that has ever existed. He had no art school behind him (he was entirely self-taught) and, by his own account, his turn to painting was sudden. Around 1923, riding past a Paris gallery, he saw a painting by Giorgio de Chirico(1888–1978), the Italian painter of empty, shadow-raked dream-squares, in the shop window, and got off to look at it. As he told the story afterward, he resolved on the spot to become a painter, despite never having trained as one. The deep, theatrical shadow and the haunted emptiness of de Chirico stayed in his work for good.

He fell in with André Breton (1896–1966) and the Surrealistcircle in Paris in the mid-1920s. Surrealism, founded by Breton in 1924, was the movement that tried to put the unconscious mind (the layer of thought that runs under reason and good manners, in the Freud-soaked thinking of the day) directly onto the canvas. It ran in two broad channels: one that let the hand move at random and find images in the mess, and one that painted impossible things with hard, photographic precision. Tanguy became one of the purest practitioners of the second kind, the “dream landscape” painter who rendered an imagined world as crisply as if he had stood in it.

With the Second World War closing over Europe, Tanguy emigrated to the United States in 1939. In 1940 he married the American Surrealist painter Kay Sage (1898–1963), in a wedding in Reno, Nevada, and the two of them eventually settled in Woodbury, Connecticut, where Tanguy would live out his life and become a naturalized American. Indefinite Divisibility is a picture from that American chapter, painted in 1942: the work of a man who had carried his one invented plain across an ocean and was painting it again, now under the wide, dry, open light of a new country. The plain in it had no model in Connecticut, or anywhere. It never had.