Seance in Connecticut

With the hurricane lamp

With the sawmill so busy it can no

longer be seen

With all the stars of hot blue words With streetcars effaced except for

their trolley poles, which point in

all directions . . .

With the lightning zigzags describing

desert furniture . . . That is the house of Yves Tanguy.

Thus the high priest of surrealism, French Poet Andre Breton, once tried to describe the atmosphere of some of the strangest paintings ever created. Last week the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hart ford, Conn, was staging a retrospective show of paintings by Yves Tanguy and his wife, Kay Sage.

Painter Sage’s art is odd, too. She pictures steel walls, draped with frozen washcloths, rising out of mud flats. “But people have seen the things I put in my paintings,” she says. “No one ever saw the world Yves paints. He’s perhaps the only true surrealist—almost like a medium.”

The Same Old Desert. Famed Surreal ist Painter Tanguy, 54, does not look like a medium—more like a country gentleman. Born in Paris at the turn of the century, Tanguy came to the U.S. in 1939, married New York-born Painter Sage, became an American citizen. Their solidly luxurious country house in Woodbury, Conn, is completely unlike the artistic “house”‘ of Breton’s poem. There are a stone terrace built by Tanguy (a do-ityourself fan), a pond with decoy ducks, and a rowboat for “harvesting the bull-rushes.” Artist Tanguy works in a made-over barn. As he describes it, he simply stands before his easel and begins to paint—without plan, without thought of what he is doing. Says he: “I am still the prisoner of my skin while I am painting, but otherwise I am free.”

As his 34 canvases in the Hartford show reveal, Tanguy has pictured the same desert, strewn with the same rubble, over and over again. His art has changed hardly at all in 29 years. His oils seem to represent hot and cold vertebrae, crystalline antennae and petrified blood vessels, heaped like Martian cairns in a dim wasteland. Tanguy lays no claim to imagination, boasts of having no purpose. Says he: “Seeking is the important thing, not painting. You may think painting is to show something new, but no: Picasso and Dali do that, and they are monkeys. I don’t want to show anything, or to teach anything. I’ve resisted learning all my life, and I don’t propose to start teaching others now.”

Dreams Like Wine. Tanguy’s reputation is based on the stubbornly continuing popularity of surrealism, on the fact that most critics tend to praise anything they do not understand—and, most of all, on skill. It may be even harder to picture things the world never saw than to picture everyday things, yet Tanguy paints the odd detritus of his dreams as crisply, convincingly and decoratively as Chardin painted food and wine. He also has a literary flair. Tanguy’s paintings may be practically interchangeable, but the obscure titles he gives them are varied and provocative—Mama, Papa Is Wounded! Slowly Toward the North; Extinction of Useless Lights; Divisibility Undefined.

Tanguy the country gentleman may be as baffled as anyone else by the products of Tanguy the painter. Baffled or not, he keeps on painting pictures that are almost all brilliantly done, decorative and mighty stimulating at first glance.