Untitled

This is a tall folding screen painted with oil paint on wood. It is made of two sets of four joined panels, and each panel stands about two hundred centimeters high, or roughly six and a half feet. Together the panels form one wide landscape. It is not a place you could visit. The scene is primordial, as if it shows the world before anything familiar had formed. The artist is Yves Tanguy, and the work is listed as Untitled. It belongs to a movement called Surrealism, which explored dreams and the imagination.

Look for the soft, rounded forms scattered through the landscape. They are called biomorphic, which means their shapes suggest living things without matching any real animal or plant. Some look a little like amoebas, tiny single-celled creatures. Notice how they sit in an open, mysterious setting rather than in a recognizable place. Then let your eye travel across the hinged panels. The scene continues from one section to the next, so the folds become part of the view. Tanguy used the whole screen as one wide stage for these strange forms.

Yves Tanguy was largely self-taught. Around 1923 he decided to become an artist after seeing a painting by Giorgio de Chirico in a shop window. A year later he read a magazine called La révolution surréaliste and grew interested in Surrealism. In 1925 André Breton welcomed him into the Surrealist group. Tanguy admired the mysterious quality of de Chirico's work and the organic shapes of Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró. From these he quickly built his own vocabulary of amoeba-like forms. This screen dates from 1928. Little is known about how it was made.

Many Surrealists were interested in the decorative arts, and made folding screens, furniture, and other objects for the home. Tanguy probably painted this screen for a patron's house. A screen usually shuts off a private space. Yet this one does something more surprising. While it can still close off the private sphere, it also opens up intimate dreams and fantasies to the outside world. Look once more at the whole surface, and imagine the screen standing in a room, hiding one space while showing you someone's inner landscape.