Creativity Quote by Yves Tanguy

Solitude is usually sold as the price of making art; Tanguy flips it into something possessive. "Very much alone in my work" reads at first like a complaint, but the pivot - "I am almost jealous of it" - turns isolation into a rival he guards and resents in the same breath. The phrasing is slyly intimate: not jealous of other artists, not jealous of audiences, but jealous of his own condition. Aloneness becomes a relationship, a third party in the studio, something that both enables the paintings and threatens to claim him.

That tension fits Tanguy and the Surrealist moment. Surrealism loved the rhetoric of access: the unconscious, automatic writing, dream logic as communal revolution against bourgeois reason. Tanguy's work, though, often feels like an internally consistent private planet - those smooth, bone-like forms on infinite plains, lit by an impersonal sky. The "almost" matters: he's not bragging about being an island; he's registering a fear that the work demands a kind of monogamy. Jealousy is what you feel when something you love might be taken, but here the thief is the work itself, consuming time, language, social life.

The subtext is a warning disguised as devotion. Artists are expected to be singular; Tanguy hints at the cost of that mythology. The studio isn't just a refuge from the world - it's an arrangement that can curdle into dependency. By naming jealousy, he admits the work is not merely an output but a force with agency, pulling him away from everything else and asking to be the only thing in the room.