Born in Paris, Yves Tanguy became one of the leading artists of a movement called Surrealism, depictions that suggested other-worldliness and eerie circumstances. Tanguy's most characteristic works are painted in a style reminiscent of Salvadore Dalí, but his imagery is highly distinctive, featuring strange landscapes in which amorphous objects proliferate in a haunted dream world. His paintings often had indefinable inhabitants, casting long shadows across a landscape, in a meticulously detailed style that bridged realism and abstraction.

The son of a sea captain, he spent his childhood in Paris and in Brittany where the landscape with its empty plateaus, grey skies and dried bones made a great impression upon him. He also spent man...