Mama, Papa is Wounded by Yves Tanguy looks and feels like a scene out of Mad Max, which is probably a little like what World War I felt like, too.

Tanguy was a Surrealist, but often his pieces felt like warscapes. This made sense because little Yves was 12 at the start of World War I, in which his brother died. And in 1920 Tanguy, himself, was drafted by the French Army and sent to Tunis, serving for two years before going back to Paris. It’s believed that “the bleakness of [his] landscape[s] may refer generally to losses suffered in the war by thousands of French families.” No one was left unscathed by the devastation of the war, leaving a vibe of severe anxiety throughout the continent that seeped into Tanguy’s art.

As for the title of this artwork, it does nothing to clear up any confusion we may have about the contents of the piece. It doesn’t help either that Tanguy was particularly quiet when it came to explaining his artistic process or sharing ideas with other artists. He blatantly stated, “I believe there is very little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods," and that "geography has no bearing on it, nor have the interests of the community in which I work." Luckily, we do know that Tanguy often gleaned his titles and painting ideas from psychiatric textbooks. Tanguy recalled having spent all day looking through them with André Breton looking for quotes from patients that were bizarre enough to use in his work. We also know that the biomorphic shapes used in Tanguy’s pieces were inspired by his idols Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró, and that the post-apocalyptic landscapes were an influence of Tanguy’s travels through Argentina, Brazil, and Tunisia. There’s a theory that “the standing yellow figure may represent a father, the cactus a mother, and the amorphous mass a child,” but if we label everything it’ll ruin the magic.