Review
She gained recognition as a painter and sculptor. Her erotic images broke the cliché of women reduced to the role of muses for creators. Returning to her home country, Tanning had the encouragement of poet James Merrill to start writing.
The artist was already in her nineties when her first book of verses, Índice, was published. Later, she would only see two volumes of memoirs published, the novel Abismo and a second collection of poems. She died in New York at the age of 101.
Justifications
- Impressionism painter.
- Surrealist painter.
- Sculptress.
- Illustrator.
- Costume designer.
- Set designer for ballets by George Balanchine.
- Poetess.
- Novelist.
- She appears in two films by avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter.
- Set designer.
Biography
Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois, and attended Knox College in her hometown before studying painting in Chicago (touring through the Art Institute where she learned what painting was). In 1941, already in New York, she met the art dealer, Julien Levy, and surrealist friends, refugees from Nazi-occupied France. At the end of 1942, she met Max Ernst. They would spend 34 years together, initially in Sedona, Arizona. Here, she would go on to paint her enigmatic versions of life from the inside, looking out: The Guest Room, The Truth About Comets, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Interior with Sudden Joy, Insomnias, Palaestra, Tamerlane, Far From. In 1956, Max and Dorothea had decided to live and work ever since in France. Although Paris was the venue, they preferred the quiet lure of country in Touraine and Provence.
These years included, for Dorothea Tanning, an intense five-year adventure in soft sculpture: Cousins, Don Juan's Breakfast, Fetish, Rainy Day Canapé, Tragic Table, Verb, Xmas, Emma, Revelation or the End of the Month, Hôtel du Pavot Room 202.
Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976, and Dorothea faced a lonely future. Returning to the United States in the late 1970s, she continued to paint: Tango Lives, Woman Artist, On Avalon, Door 84, Still in the Studio, Blue Mom, Dionysos S.O.S., and she gave free rein to her long-felt compulsion to write. Words, poetry. Written, read, listened. Since then, her poems have appeared in various book reviews and magazines, including The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, The Southwest Review, Parnassus,and in Best Poems of 2002 and 2005. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm.
https://www.dorotheatanning.org/dorothea-tanning/about-the-artist (01/04/2022)
https://elcultural.com/indice (01/04/2022)
Works
The Reina Sofía Museum collects the largest exhibition of the artist in Spain and can be consulted at the following link. The exhibition "Detrás de la puerta, invisible, otra puerta" runs through the different artistic and vital stages of the artist's career: childhood and family scenes, girls dressed in Victorian style, bucolic baroque nudes and red rock deserts, and, finally, the representations of flowers, so relevant in her last stage.
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/dorothea-tanning (01/04/2022)
Bibliography
Coxon, Ann, Mahon, Alyce , Murga Castro, Idoia, y Tanning, Dorothea (2018). Detrás de la puerta, invisible, otra Puerta. Alyce Mahon y el departamento de Actividades Editoriales del MNCARS. Available on https://www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/publicaciones/catalogosPDF/11_dorothea_tanning._castellano.mncars.imprenta.pdf
Tanning, Dorothea (Marta López Luaces' tanslation) (2019). Índice. Madrid: Vaso Roto.
Dorothea Tanning Foundation (2013). A project of The Dorothea Tanning Foundation https://www.dorotheatanning.org/ (01/04/2022)
Didactic approach
The Reina Sofía Museum collects the largest exhibition of the artist in Spain and can be consulted at the following link. The exhibition "Detrás de la puerta, invisible, otra puerta" runs through the different artistic and vital stages of the artist's career: childhood and family scenes, girls dressed in Victorian style, bucolic baroque nudes and red rock deserts, and, finally, the representations of flowers, so relevant in her last stage.
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/dorothea-tanning (01/04/2022)
Documents