She sought to show ‘unknown but knowable states’, to imply that there was more to life than meets the eye. Dorothea’s art defies classification. Her works expose her remarkable surrealist vision, with endless doorways, dazzling eyeballs, and ripping walls. But how did her visionary worlds integrate surrealism and sensuous transcendence? And just how would the world react to her radical revolution? This is the story of Dorothea Tanning’s bizarre and wild universe…
The Fire of Surrealism
Dorothea Tanning, the daughter of Swedish parents, was born in America on August 25th, 1910, in Galesburg, Illinois. She later declared:
“Nothing ever happened but the wallpaper.”
When she was 16, Dorothea began working as a library assistant at the Galesburg Public Library. She was impressed by the books she encountered there, pondering a literary career. She wrote in her memoirs:
‘If there was anything at all that troubled my certain destiny as a painter, it was the Galesburg Public Library.’
In 1928, she enrolled at Knox College, a local liberal arts college, before going to Chicago and enrolling at the Chicago Academy of Art in 1930. However, she only stayed for three weeks. She soon turned to art, primarily self-taught. There was something about that world that caught her eye.
Dorothea moved to New York in 1935, where she worked as a commercial artist and became acquainted with the work of surrealists. Surrealism was a movement that developed in Europe after World War I. Artists depict unnerving, illogical scenes. Artist André Breton described surrealism’s aim as:
“To resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality, or surreality.”
As a freelance illustrator, Dorothea designed advertisements for Macy’s department shop and other clients until the early 1940s.
In December 1936, Dorothea visited Alfred H. Barr Junior’s ground-breaking exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ at the Museum of Modern Art, which included work by the likes of Eileen Agar, Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Marcel Duchamp, Louis Aragon and René Magritte.
The surrealist works she saw there profoundly affected her. She felt an affinity with the artists on show. As she later recalled:
“Here in the museum is the real explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels. Here is the infinitely faceted world I must have been waiting for. Here is the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY, a perspective having only incidentally to do with painting on surfaces.”
Five years later, as a stream of European refugee artists arrived in the city during World War II, banished or rescued from a war-torn Europe, Dorothea was exposed to and formed close ties with surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy, as well as her future husband Max Ernst.
They spark a fire inside Dorothea. After that, both Dorothea and surrealism would never be the same…
The Desires of a New Kind of Surrealist
Max Ernst came to Dorothea’s Manhattan apartment one day in 1942 to look at some paintings for an all-woman show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery. He chose the only two finished works Dorothea had. Dorothea and Max then played chess.
He never returned home.
Dorothea and Max married in 1946.
The painting that drew the attention of Max was Dorothea’s striking 1942 self-portrait, ‘Birthday’. Where many male surrealists have been criticised for their depiction of women as passive objects of desire, Dorothea’s frequent female protagonists exude entirely different qualities.
In ‘Birthday’, for example, Dorothea wears a ‘Shakespearean’ dress, the top ripped open to reveal her bare breasts, the skirt a tangle of branches and drapery. At her feet sits a strange winged creature, while behind her an endless series of partially open doors is reflected in a mirror. She is the active participant in her own strange venture into the unknown, standing poised and upright, her sexuality entirely her own.
“My dreams are bristling with objects that relate to nothing in the dictionary. Dreams one reads in books are composed of known symbols but it is their strangeness that distinguishes them.”
– Dorothea.
Her work from this period blends the familiar and the unusual, delving into her innermost desires. She questioned convention at every turn, through painting, costume design, soft sculpture, poetry, prose, and more. Most importantly, she refused to be defined by labels.
While she is commonly classified as a ‘surrealist’ due to the dreamlike imagery, magical landscapes, and the unexplainable scenes that pepper her work, she subsequently stated:
“I still believe in the surrealist effort to plumb our deepest subconscious to find out about ourselves. But please don’t say I’m carrying the surrealist banner.”
In ‘Birthday’, we see the infinite sequence of doors, symbolising the infinite possibilities of what lies ahead. And what lay ahead for her was something remarkable…
Beyond the Infinite
In her work, Dorothea sought to show ‘unknown but knowable states’, to imply that there was more to existence than meets the eye. At first, her work was overtly realistic and decisively surrealist. Take her 1943 work, ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’.
Two young girls stand on a red-carpeted corridor, their clothes ripped. One is slumped against a door frame, absorbed in thought, while the other, her hair standing dramatically upright, gazes at a massive, tendrilled sunflower. There are other doors behind them, the last of which has a flaming glow. The girls appear to be sleepwalking. The finished piece is both beautiful and unsettling.
Curator Alyce Mahon writes:
‘Tanning seemed to insist that the key to enlightenment was the femme-enfant who was not yet inhibited by society’s expectations and moral codes. Her female figures are poetic in their transformative powers and challenge fear and revulsion.’
After Max abandoned his American citizenship during the McCarthy Era’s extreme conservatism and nationalistic Cold War fervour, he and Dorothea relocated to France in the 1950s. Dorothea’s work became increasingly ambiguous and enigmatic in the years that followed.
She began to experiment with more abstract techniques, employing dynamic compositions and bright, prismatic colour planes. In ‘Insomnias’ (1957), Dorothea depicts a cracked stained glass window washed in blue, violet, and rust. She said:
“I wanted to lead the eye into spaces that hid, revealed, transformed all at once, where there would be some never-before-seen image, as if it had appeared with no help from me.”
Her experimentations with colour, light, shape, and volume in increasingly strange environments pushed her compositions from surrealism to the brink of abstraction. By the late 1960s, Dorothea began creating bizarre creatures out of wool-stuffed fabric that appear to emerge from and melt into their surroundings. We see these pioneering soft sculptures in the immersive artwork, ‘Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202’ (1970-1973).
In this piece, surrealistic bodies emerge out of the walls of a room, a diorama that can be approached but not entered. Inside this eerie chamber, stomachs and rears burst through the floral wallpaper, while the armchair, fireplace and table sprout tumorous limbs. The sickly sense of dread it invokes still feels startlingly radical 53 years later.
Her recurring motifs of cloth, doors and wallpaper represent the thresholds that create otherworldly environments. She was intrigued by how illogical events are incorporated into commonplace, everyday spaces.
She never really moved beyond surrealism. In ‘Birthday’, we see the infinite reflections of doors symbolising the possibilities of what lies ahead. By ‘Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202’, those otherworldly realms burst into our reality, blurring the lines between the logical and illogical.
She makes us question everything and accept the infinite possibilities of life itself. No artist had taken abstraction this far before and perhaps no one ever will again.
Abstract surrealism was something she embraced the older she grew, and the more confident she became…
The Last Murmur
In 1976, Dorothea produced ‘Murmurs’. It depicts a headless female form, sitting cross-legged on a pink crescent moon against a dark sky, a humanised dog sitting on her shoulder staring at the viewer. In her later work, Dorothea adopted a more figurative approach. Her art is preoccupied with thresholds, areas where feeling, fiction, reality and imagination collide.
Reverie and tenderness define her work throughout this period. She is saying, “There is more to life than meets the eye.” Her portrayal of relationships came as she lost her husband. The sense of togetherness, set to simple backdrops, indicates Dorothea’s longing for that which she has lost and her loneliness. It is the beautiful otherworld colliding with our world that exemplifies her work.
Following the loss of her husband Max in Paris in 1980, Dorothea relocated to New York. While she continued to create visual art, she also began to write, eventually becoming an accomplished and well-published poet.
Collages, costume and set designs, drawings, etchings, fabric installation, fiction, jewellery, memoirs, numerous volumes of poetry, painting, print and sculptures, were among her prolific output over a career spanning more than 70 years.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Dorothea produced some of her most ambitious paintings, collages, and works. She began to devote more of her attention to writing later in life. Dorothea released two autobiographies (1986 and 2001), a novel (2004), and two collections of poems (2004 and 2011), the last of which, ‘Coming to That’, was released in 2012, the year of her death.
Dorothea died on January 31st, 2012 in New York City. She was 101.
The Dreams of the Radical Surrealist
Dorothea sought to show ‘unknown but knowable states’ in her abstract surrealist works, implying that there was more to life than what we see. Her remarkable paintings can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
Dorothea’s art defies classification.
While her paintings are fantastical, they contain highly personal truths. Her works expose her remarkable surrealist vision, with endless doorways, dazzling eyeballs, and ripping walls. Although she admired the female form, she considered that gender-based assessments of her work limiting rather than illuminating it. She categorically refused the label ‘woman artist’, stating:
“You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.”
But how did her visionary worlds integrate surrealism and sensuous transcendence? By subverting gender standards and identity. But she was not a feminist. She would have rejected this interpretation in favour of being seen on her own terms.
She was a trailblazer. Her singular vision, albeit strange, is startling in its radical abstraction. It is, if anything, a revolution. You can compare her to Dalí if you want (she is easily his equal in terms of artistic merit), but she was very much her own person and her work stands apart from other surrealists.
She felt obliged to convey her message, blurring the lines between the logical and illogical, through any means available to her, eventually turning to writing and poetry in the final decades of her extremely diverse career. She is not someone who you can apply a label to.
Dorothea Tanning spent her life showing the world her bizarre and wild universe. She taught us to embrace the fantastical. To question everything. And to accept that there is more to life than meets the eye. We should not put her in a box because she showed us how to leave ours…
She once said:
“There are realities that have nothing to do with logic; and that diving into the subconscious – I call it subconscious – is the way to find them.”
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https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/925/
Post Sources
https://artherstory.net/the-life-and-art-of-dorothea-tanning/, https://theconversation.com/dorothea-tanning-an-unusual-surrealist-with-a-unique-female-gaze-131214, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Tanning, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/dorothea-tanning-2024, https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/dorothea-tanning-at-tate-modern, https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/11580/female-surrealist-dorothea-tanning-tate-modern-exhibition-ann-coxon-curator, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/dorothea-tanning, https://www.kasmingallery.com/artist/dorothea-tanning, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/08/dangerous-appetites-the-weird-wild-world-of-artist-dorothea-tanning, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-dorothea-tannings-powerful-surrealist-art-defied-convention, https://www.artnet.com/artists/dorothea-tanning/, https://www.thecollector.com/dorothea-tanning-a-radical-surrealist/, https://www.artsy.net/artist/dorothea-tanning, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/134284
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