I Await You
Yves Tanguy
UNKNOWN RHENISH MASTER, c.1478. OIL AND GOLD ON PANEL.
A strange alien landscape in gradated shades of grey that offer no clear horizon, only an infinite expanse towards nothingness. On the front plane, a dense smattering of anthropomorphic objects that appear at a glance familiar reveal themselves to be wholly unknowable on inspection. Yves Tanguy met the father of Surrealism in 1925 and, a year later, wholeheartedly joined the movement, with his involvement reaching something of a culmination in this large scale canvas that meticulously depicts the impossible world of our dreams, while calling towards the desolate Brittany landscape of Tanguy’s childhood. The work was called, with typical surrealist mystery, ‘I Await You’, and three years after its completion it enraptured an American painted named Kay Savage. She arranged an introduction through a mutual friend and within a few years they began a marriage that lasted the rest of their lives. There were no coincidences in surrealism – Tanguy painted with the subconscious knowledge that someone was missing from his life and it was the painting, not him, that found her.