Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy was born on January 5, 1900 in Paris. While attending the Lycée during the 1910s, he met Henri Matisse’s youngest son, Pierre Matisse, who would become his future dealer and lifelong friend.
In 1918 he joined the merchant marine and traveled to Africa, South America and England. During his military service at Lunéville in 1920, Tanguy became friends with the poet Jacques Prévert. He returned to Paris in 1922 after volunteer service in Tunisia and began drawing scenes in Parisian cafes that were praised by Maurice de Vlaminck.
After learning about the work of Giorgio de Chirico in 1923, Tanguy decided to become a painter. In 1924, he, Prévert, and Marcel Duhamel moved into a house that would become the meeting place for the Surrealists. Tanguy he became interested in surrealism in 1924, when he met the newspaper La Révolution surréaliste. André Breton welcomed him to the Surrealist group the following year.
Despite his lack of formal training, the art of Tanguy he developed rapidly and the maturity of his style emerged in 1927. His first solo exhibition was held in 1927 at the Galerie Surréaliste in Paris. In 1928 he participated with Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and others in the surrealist exhibition held at the Galerie au Sacre du Printemps, Paris. Tanguy he incorporated into his work images of geological formations that he had observed during a trip to Africa in 1930. He exhibited extensively during the 1930s in individual and group surrealist exhibitions in New York, Brussels, Paris, and London.
In 1939, Tanguy He met the painter Kay Sage in Paris and that same year he traveled with her to the southwestern United States. They married in 1940 and settled in Woodbury, Connecticut. In 1942, Tanguy He participated in the Artists in Exile exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, where he exhibited frequently until 1950.
In 1947, his work was included in the exhibition Le Surréalisme in 1947, organized by Breton and Marcel Duchamp at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. He became a citizen of the United States in 1948. In 1953 he visited Rome, Milan and Paris for his solo exhibitions in those cities. The following year, he shared an exhibition with Kay Sage at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and appeared in Hans Richter’s 8×8 film.
A retrospective of the work of Tanguy was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, eight months after his death, on January 15, 1955, in Woodbury, United States.