Gordon Onslow Ford
|
|
|||||
|
|
||||||
 |
Gordon Onslow Ford
|
|
|||||
|
|
||||||
|
| Yves Tanguy and The New Subject in
Painting
The Child's Brain, by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914
As has been told before, but like a fairy tale cannot be told too often, one day in 1922 in Paris while riding the open platform of a bus along the Rue La Boetie, Yves Tanguy saw in the window of the Gallery Paul Guillaume a painting by Giorgio de Chirico titled The Child's Brain, painted in 1914.
|
 In
the middle ground (the present):A mustachioed father figure with eyes closed in reverie. The father is imagining, on a table in front of him, a yellow book with a red marker in it, a symbolic reference to the sexual union of father and mother, resented by the child viewing the painting, who is in competition with his father for the love of his mother. In the background (the future): Through a window, there is an arcade in shadow supporting a building in which there is a rectangular opening to the blue sky. This building in shadow may symbolize the as yet unknown mysterious woman whom the young painter hopes one day to meet. On the left of the window, partially seen, there is a red factory chimney pointing towards the sky (the painter in symbolic form, here as yet only half a man). In the far distant future is the blue sky that could well be a symbol for the future meeting place in the unconscious with the as yet unknown woman, his muse. But what probably struck Tanguy most, beyond any Freudian interpretation, was that the painting was mysterious and that it pointed towards the mysteries of the unconscious. |
|
Next |
|
Articles
Yves
Tanguy and The New Subject in Painting
The
painting had been lent to the gallery by Andre Breton, whom Tanguy had
not yet met. Tanguy got off the bus to look at the painting and in a few
seconds his life was changed forever. The Child's Brain was a major
influence in the lives of both Breton and Tanguy and merits a few notes
as an introduction to the painting of Yves Tanguy.