Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) was a French surrealist painter who specialized in strange osseous and vegetal formations placed in a barren, lunarlike landscape or an eerie underwater setting.

Born in Paris on Jan. 5, 1900, to Breton parents, Yves Tanguy spent his childhood vacations in Finistère, an area of Brittany that contained many prehistoric menhirs and dolmens. His memories of this terrain may have gone into the fashioning of his fantastic landscapes. In 1918 he shipped out on cargo boats to Africa and South America. Drafted into the French army in 1920, he served in Tunis. After 1922 he was closely associated in Paris with the surrealist writers Jacques Prévert and Marcel Duhamel.

In 1923, upon seeing a painting of the "metaphysical" Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, Tanguy decided to become a painter. He met André Breton in 1925, and the following year, some of his work having appeared in the...