Tanguy 'Mama, Papa Is Wounded'

Yves Tanguy was a self-taught artist and his first paintings have been described as naïve. His surrealism is referred to as “nonrepresentational”, defined as artwork which is not immediately distinguishable and open to much interpretation.
In “Mama, Papa is Wounded!”, we can see a vast, open landscape; a beach or simply a flat plane, possibly a desert. These objects are fairly abstract in shape and are not particularly recognisable. The object in the top left hand corner of the painting looks like a cactus, from which faint white lines are drawn, linked to scattered black spots on the piece. Could the cactus represent a person? Perhaps a person watching from a distance the destruction happening in the right hand side of the image;
The palette used is limited to sombre tones of grey and blue with hints of brown. The objects populating the landscape are painted using darker colours in order to make them distinguishable. The most prominent use of line in this painting is that of the horizon. There are no converging lines that one would imagine would meet, but the object in the foreground to the right is drawn larger than the cactus in the background which creates perspective; the suggestion is that the cactus is further away in the distance. For viewers this is less shocking as it is conventional to use perspective to give the impression of
It conjures up a sense of doom: the looming horizon, the emptiness of the background, the cactus alone in the corner, the fatal-looking smoke, and the helplessness of the small figures. This gives the title a sense of purpose and illuminates the viewers’ understanding of what the image is attempting to convey. Tanguy was born in Brittany which could account for the submarine effect of this painting. ‘The world is different from reality but it is a living world, which is Tanguy’s.’ Tanguy saw this image entirely in his imagination before starting to paint it. ‘”Mama, Papa’s Wounded!” was randomly chosen by Tanguy and Breton from the chapter headings of a parapsychology text.’: “I remember spending a whole afternoon with … [André Breton],” he said, “leafing through books on psychiatry in the search for statements of patients which could be used as titles for paintings.” “Parapsychology” is ‘the study of mental phenomena that are excluded from or inexplicable by orthodox scientific psychology (such as hypnosis, telepathy, etc.).’ The fact that Tanguy grappled with ideas sis shocking in itself. The idea of attempting to express mental states of mind or consciousness through artwork was not a concept that was easily adjusted to by viewers. ‘It was Andre Breton who finally took hold of the word and defined it in the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 as “pure