Tanguy was riding a bus through Paris in 1923 when he spotted a painting by Giorgio de Chirico in a gallery window. He became so agitated he jumped off at the next stop and ran back to look at it. He decided on the spot to become a painter. He had no training whatsoever. He was twenty-three.

He was born in Paris in 1900. He briefly joined the merchant navy in 1918 before being drafted into the army, where he met the poet Jacques Prevert, who later introduced him to Andre Breton's Surrealist circle. He joined the Surrealists in 1925 and had his first solo show just two years later, having taught himself everything.

His paintings consistently depict flat, featureless landscapes resembling sea floors or alien terrain, populated by biomorphic forms that look like melted rocks or bones. He never explained them. The palette is muted, the horizons infinite, the atmosphere airless. The same vocabulary of forms appears across decades of work with only gradual variation.

He married the American Surrealist painter Kay Sage in Reno, Nevada, in 1940. They settled in Woodbury, Connecticut, converting an old farmhouse into a studio. He died there in 1955, aged fifty-five.