A self-taught artist, Yves Tanguy joined the Surrealist movement in his mid-twenties, associating himself with fellow artists such as Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. Born in France, Yves settled in the United States in 1939 and came to marry the American Surrealist painter, Kay Sage, the subsequent year. Tanguy favored imaginative complexities of line and color, creating enigmatic, dreamlike forms often executed with photographic clarity. Aesthetically, his work can be compared to that of Dali or Joan Miro, however his major formative influence was Giorgio de Chirico.