Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Tanning (born August 25, 1910, Galesburg, Illinois, U.S.—died January 31, 2012, New York, New York) was an American artist and author who, during her seven-decade career, moved between painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, and writing. Her art was associated with Surrealism, and she built on the movement’s ambitions and visual elements to create new forms. In her paintings, she took as her subjects the human figure, the unconscious mind, dream landscapes, sexuality, and desire. As the Tate Modern museum wrote in an introduction to its 2019 exhibition of her work, “Tanning wanted to depict ‘unknown but knowable states’: to suggest there was more to life than meets the eye.”

Early life and interest in Surrealism

Tanning was the daughter of Swedish immigrants and grew up in Galesburg, a small rural town in Illinois. In 1928 she enrolled at Knox College, a local liberal arts university, before briefly attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930. After withdrawing, Tanning spent countless hours studying the paintings in the museum and became largely a self-taught artist. In 1935 she moved to New York and worked as a freelance illustrator, creating advertisements for such clients as Macy’s. The following year Tanning visited the “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was so impressed that she traveled to Paris in 1939 with letters of introduction to meet the Surrealists. Most of the artists, however, had fled to the United States amid the threat of imminent war.

Birthday and other early works

Tanning returned to New York, where in 1941 she met Julien Levy and began exhibiting her work at his gallery. She also married writer Homer Shannon, with whom she had had a sporadic relationship for eight years. The couple separated after six months and divorced a year later. In 1942 Tanning finally met a Surrealist artist, the painter and sculptor Max Ernst, who visited her studio on the recommendation of Levy. On the strength of her self-portrait, Birthday, which later became one of her most well-known works, Ernst recruited her to participate in a group exhibition at the gallery of his then-wife, art collector Peggy Guggenheim. The “Exhibition by 31 Women,” considered the first art show in the United States dedicated to women artists, opened at Art of This Century gallery in 1943. In addition to Tanning, the exhibition featured the work of Frida Kahlo, Leonor Fini, Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, and Louise Nevelson, among others.

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As seen in Birthday, Tanning’s work during this period was the type of Surrealism associated with such artists as René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, in which the artists painted meticulously detailed dreamworlds populated by commonplace objects that are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and sometimes unsettling fashion. The painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943; A Little Night Music), for example, creates an unsettling scene with great detail. An enormous sunflower lies at the top of a staircase in what appears to be a shabby hotel with cracking paint and a row of numbered doors, the last of which is ajar and emits a glowing light. A female figure, her hair upright and hands clenched, stands near the flower’s tangled vines, her back toward the viewer. Another female leans against a shut door, seemingly exhausted, and grips a sunflower petal in her hand. More petals lie on the stairs. Both of the female figures’ clothes are torn, as if from a struggle—possibly with the sunflower.

In 1944 Tanning had her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery, and in 1945 she began the first of several projects creating set and costume designs for ballets by George Balanchine. Tanning and Ernst married in 1946, and the following year, the couple built a house in Sedona, Arizona.

Mid-career abstract paintings, soft sculptures, and other works

In the mid-1950s Tanning began making more abstract paintings, such as Le Mal oublié (1955; The Ill Forgotten) and Insomnies (1957), which feature figures, faces, and human-like forms in fractured planes. During this same period she and Ernst moved to France in 1957. In 1969 Tanning began experimenting with fabrics, using a sewing machine to create soft human-like sculptures. In Étreinte (1969; Embrace) two of these soft figures, one made of flesh-colored wool flannel and a bunch of yellow synthetic fur resembling hair and another figure made with brown synthetic fur interlock in an almost acrobatic configuration. Tanning’s most well-known of these works, Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970–73; Poppy Hotel, Room 202), an early example of installation art, features groups of the soft figures breaking through the wallpapered walls, furniture, and fireplace of an imitation hotel room. About this time she began to experiment with printmaking and continued to paint compositions of interlocking biomorphic forms resembling her sculptures.

Later art and writing

Ernst died in 1976, and a few years later Tanning returned to New York, where she continued to make prints and paintings. Her late works, from the end of the 1990s, depict abstract floral forms, which she published in Another Language of Flowers: Paintings (1998), a book of poetry by selected authors. In her later years, Tanning devoted herself to writing, publishing the memoir Birthday (1986), which was expanded and reissued as Between Lives: An Artist and Her World in 2001. She also wrote a novel, Chasm: A Weekend (2004), and produced two collections of her poetry, A Table of Content: Poems (2004) and Coming to That (2011). Her writing appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review. In 1994 Tanning bestowed the Academy of American Poets with an endowment, which was used to establish the Wallace Stevens Award.

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