Tanguy's paintings have a unique, immediately recognizable style of nonrepresentational surrealism. They show vast, abstract landscapes, mostly in a tightly limited palette of colors, only occasionally showing flashes of contrasting color accents. Typically, these alien landscapes are populated with various abstract shapes, sometimes angular and sharp as shards of glass, sometimes with an intriguingly organic look to them, like giant amoebae suddenly turned to stone.^{[citation needed]}

According to Nathalia Brodskaïa, Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927) is one of Tanguy's most impressive paintings. He took the title of this and other works from psychiatric textbooks: "I remember spending a whole afternoon with ... [André Breton]," he said, "leafing through books on psychiatry in the search for statements of patients which could be used as titles for paintings." Brodskaïa writes that the painting reflects his debt to Giorgio de Chirico – falling shadows and a classical torso – and conjures up a sense of doom: the horizon, the emptiness of the plain, the solitary plant, the smoke, the helplessness of the small figures. Tanguy said that it was an image he saw entirely in his imagination before starting to paint it.^[3]

Tanguy's style was an important influence on several younger painters, such as Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, and Esteban Francés, who adopted a Surrealist style in the 1930s.^[4] Later, Tanguy's paintings (and, less directly, that of de Chirico) influenced the style of the French animated movie Le Roi et l'oiseau, by Paul Grimault and Prévert.^[5]

^{————————————————————————Roberto Matta}