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Imagined Scenes

An interior window framed by brown curtains shows a view into a landscape with grass, shrubs, trees, and a dirt path beneath a blue sky with white clouds in this vertical painting. Upon closer inspection, the three legs of a wooden easel, the clip holding a canvas at the top, and a white, stapled edge draws our attention to the fact that a painted canvas rests directly in front of the window. 
René Magritte, La condition humaine, 1933, oil on canvas, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 1987.55.1
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A charcoal-gray, pointed, tower-like form wrapped with cords or vines rises to our left against a barren desert in this horizontal painting. Light falls from our left onto the sharply pointed tip of the tower. A deep, jagged shadow cast from a formation outside of our view to our left falls across the oatmeal-brown desert floor. Two rounded white forms, perhaps stones, lie near the lower right corner, and cast ink-black shadows on the ground. The horizon comes just over a third of the way up the composition. Along the horizon, two clusters of buildings and low hills are painted with tones of hazy indigo blue and tan. The sky above is ice blue, and a veil-like cloud stretches from the horizon to our left of center up into the right corner. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “Kay Sage 40.”
Kay Sage, A Finger on the Drum, 1940, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the estate of the artist), 2014.136.92
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A sky streaked with azure blue stretches over a gray landscape in this surreal, vertical painting. The sky and land meet halfway up the canvas at a series of short, sharp, charcoal-gray peaks, like canine teeth. Small, diffuse, butter-yellow ovals waft above the peaks. Nine fluffy, cotton-ball like shapes cast narrow shadows across the gray-streaked plane. Three amorphous shapes float over the land closer to us. A ginger-brown, drippy form is to our left, a teal-green, bean-shaped object surrounded with fuzzy white tentacles is to our right, and a peacock-blue, L-shaped drip floats in the distance near the horizon. Thinly painted white and gray lines squiggle or sweep onto the canvas from the left edge. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right, “Yves Tanguy 29.”
Yves Tanguy, The Look of Amber, 1929, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Fund, 1984.75.1
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