Vintage 1960s Tanguy “Four O'Clock in Summer: Hope” Surrealist Swiss Art Print

A vintage mid century reproduction of Yves Tanguy's Four O'Clock in Summer: Hope (1929) measuring 7.25" x 9.75" on glossy paper with hints of patina affixed to vintage textured blue cardstock.

Printed in Switzerland in the 1960s.

Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), known as just Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter. Tanguy was in many respects the quintessential Surrealist. A sociable eccentric who ate spiders as a party trick, and a close friend of Andre Breton, Tanguy was best-known for his misshapen rocks and molten surfaces that lent definition to the Surrealist aesthetic. Self-taught but enormously skilled, Tanguy painted a hyper-real world with exacting precision. His landscapes, a high-octane blend of fact and fiction, captured the attention of important artists and thinkers from Salvador Dali to Mark Rothko who admitted their debt to the older artist. And even Carl Gustav Jung used a canvas by Tanguy to illustrate his theory of the collective unconscious.

Tanguy's symbolism is personal, reflecting his obsession with childhood memory, dreams, hallucinations and psychotic episodes. It defies explicit interpretation, and evokes a range of associations that engage the viewer's imagination and emotions. His landscapes strike a balance between realism and fantasy. Naturalistically-depicted objects hover in midair, or drift toward the sky. Masterful manipulations of scale and perspective, and keen observations of the natural world contribute to the hallucinatory effect of his scenes. His bizarre rock formations were most likely inspired by the terrain of Brittany, where his mother lived.

Like other Surrealists, Tanguy was preoccupied with dreams and the unconscious. What set him apart was the naturalistic precision with which he depicted the mind and its contents. This was his key contribution. More vividly than any artist before him, Tanguy imagined and depicted the unconscious as a place.

Notes on the work of art at time of printing: “At the sight of this picture, and many others by Tanguy, one is tempted to say: this is the bottom of the sea, a floating world of strange flora and fauna beyond the pull of gravity. After all, Tanguy was a sailor in his youth. André Breton has corrected this view in a few words: "Those who, to reassure themselves, persist in speaking here of a submarine atmosphere forget that the imaginative faculty of an artist is in close touch with all the varied phenomena of the Cosmos." The eerie world imagined by Tanguy exists nowhere but on his canvases.

Yet the tensions, distances, suspensions, speeds, and petrifi-cations that he so meticulously organizes in his pictures can be met with in life, in books, in music, in museums.”