The Dreamhound That Got Away

One figure I’d hoped to feature as a possible player character in Dreamhounds of Paris is the painter Yves Tanguy. His imaginary biomorphic landscapes seem as dreamlandish as better-documented movement cohorts Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, or André Masson. Their undulating forms evoke a primordial soup on the verge of spawning life. His careful delineations of things that never existed suggest a place where biology itself may take revenge on unwary Dreamlands explorers.

I was disappointed to find little biographical information on him in English. It’s not that he wasn’t a colorful character. We know he was taciturn when sober, but violent when drunk. That gives a player seeking a problem-making character who tears things up something to work with. He took part in at least one armed attack on behalf of the surrealists, in 1930 joining the angry gang that descended on a bar run by former movement member Robert Desnos. Desnos’ offense? Naming the place Maldoror, after the protean anti-hero of a novel beloved by the surrealists, and thus cheapening the holy reputation of its long-dead author, the Comte de Lautréamont.

Tanguy lived in squalor but always kept himself fastidiously clean, and fashionably clothed. Concern for hygiene didn’t, it must be said, prevent him from eating bugs when out on country walks. He styled his hair to stand straight up on end and looks not entirely unlike a later exponent of the rebel ethos, John Lydon.

He was sex drugs and rock and roll before rock n roll existed in other ways, too. When movement gatekeeper André Breton first met him, he was hopped up on cocaine. His headlong pursuit of Bohemian excess wrecked his first marriage.

Tanguy roomed with two other men who would go on to shape French culture, the writer Jacques Prévert and the future crime fiction tastemaker Marcel Duhamel.

In 1936 he was pursued by the irrepressible American collector, philanthropist and art groupie Peggy Guggenheim. This could generate some interplay with Max Ernst, who wound up with her later.

Like many others in the surrealist circle Tanguy escaped to the US when the war broke out.

With so many other figures vying for limited space in Dreamhounds, this didn’t seem like enough to go on to give him more than a cursory entry. But maybe you prefer to play someone without too many established life highlights to navigate your character decisions around. If so, this spiky-haired scrapper needs only some game statistics before joining the dreamscaping fray.