Painted in 1939, La lumière de l'ombre is a seminal example of Tanguy's mature style, presenting an enigmatic landscape populated by a variety of elements evoking biomorphic forms, rock formations and man-made objects. The dynamic of the present composition is derived from the juxtaposition of the complex and refined foreground with the vast expanse of the background and the sky, representing a t.mes less, metaphysical space.
Tanguy was the first Surrealist artist to move to the United States in 1939, as one of many fleeing the war in Europe. Together with his soon-to-be wife Kay Sage, he was quickly surrounded by a number of important artists and intellectuals including Julien Lévy, André Masson and Arshile Gorky. In this lively artistic environment, manifold influences were established between European and American painters, many of whom exhibited at the avant-garde Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Tanguy's own art underwent a gentle transformation as the artist embraced the more luminous palette evident in the present work, probably inspired by his relationship with Sage and a sense of burgeoning hope inspired by his new life in America.
Tanguy: Europe and America 1939-1940
Tanguy had been invited to become a member of the Surrealist group by André Breton in 1925, and by 1927 he had developed a new and highly personal Surrealist language. Tanguy received no formal artistic training, and it was the memory of his childhood summers spent near Finistère in Brittany, on the western coast of France overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, which were to have the most profound influence on his artistic style. It was during these stays that Tanguy had observed prehistoric rock formations and objects floating on water or washed up on the shore, elements that, subjectively transformed, frequently appear in the dream world he celebrated as a mature painter. A further important influence was his trip to North Africa in 1930, where he observed the extraordinary natural geological structures and stratifications present in the Atlas Mountains.
James Thrall Soby discussed these influences - exemplified in the present work - writing: ‘After his African voyage, Tanguy usually substituted mineral forms for the vegetal ones used in earlier works. His color became more complex and varied, with extremes of light and dark replacing the relatively even tonality of his previous pictures. At the same t.mes he made more and more frequent use of one of his most poetic inventions - the melting of land into sky, one image metamorphosed into another, as in the moving-picture technique known as lap-dissolve. The fixed horizon was now often replaced by a continuous and flowing treatment of space, and in many paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, it is extremely difficult to determine at what point earth becomes sky or whether objects rest on the ground or float aloft. The ambiguity is intensified by changes in the density of the objects themselves, from opaque to translucent to transparent, creating a spatial double entendre’ (J. T. Soby, Yves Tanguy (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955, pp. 17 & 18).
Indeed, the background of the present work is composed of a subtle gradation of luminous shades of pink, achieving the appearance described by Soby. The various shapes occupying the foreground are suggestive approximations of familiar forms, yet none of them can be identified as concrete or recognisable objects, further emphasising the enigmatic and unsettling effect of the composition. In its remarkable richness, complexity and precision of execution, La lumière de l'ombre is a truly outstanding example of Tanguy's Surrealist art.