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Yves Tanguy and The New Subject in Painting

Chateau de Chemilieu

Andre, Jacqueline, and Aube Breton, Yves Tanguy, Matta and Anne, Esteban Frances, myself, and a continuous coming and going of other friends, spent the summer of 1939 at the Chateau de Chemilieu, on a bluff above the river Rhone near lake Bourget. The Chateau had been recommended to us by Gertrude Stein who had a summer house nearby at Belignin. It was a gathering that included the youngest members of the Surrealist group. Only Paalen was absent, who having predicted the coming hostilities in Europe, had gone to Canada with Alice Rahon and Eva Sulzer where he made a fine collection of Northwest Coast Indian carvings and objects, before going to Mexico via New York City.

The Chateau became a hive of activities, poetry, painting, and the creation of cadavre esquis. It was there that Tanguy painted Arrieres Pensees (Second Thoughts), now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Change was in the air and the group decided that, if war were to break out in Europe, it would be of more importance to go on with our creative activities than it would be to participate in the hostilities.

Meanwhile at the Chateau, Andre Breton read poetry to us and spoke of the early days of Surrealism. He was passing on the flame (perhaps unconsciously) to the younger generation for whom the paintings and life of Yves Tanguy were a shining beacon. Andre Breton wrote his poem "La Maison d' Yves Tanguy" (The House of Yves Tanguy) at Chemilieu. Sometimes we played cards in the evening, gambling for the high stakes of poems and drawings. We did not know then that an era was coming to an end. When war was declared, the creative life in Paris became impossible and was never the same again. In one direction or another we were dispersed but, miraculously, after trials and adventures, we all met again on the American Continent.