Dorothea Tanning

The second daughter of Amanda and Andrew Tanning, Dorothea was born on August 25, 1910 in rural Galesburg, Illinois. Practically born with a pen in hand, she knew that she wanted to be an artist very early on. At age eighteen, Dorothea matriculated at Knox College, a small liberal-arts school in Galesburg; however, she only stayed for two years before moving to Chicago. In Chicago, she enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Art, where she found instruction too rigid and opted to gaze at the paintings at the Art Institute rather than attend her classes. Her true artistic awakening came in 1936 when she moved to New York and attended the famous exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art and discovered these avant-garde art movements.

In 1941, after working in the commercial art world for a few years, primarily for Macy's, Tanning was introduced to Julien Levy, New York's paramount dealer of Surrealist artwork. Whether it was because of her artistic style, her American upbringing, or her energetic beauty, Tanning gained ascendecy in the art world more rapidly than many of her female contemporaries. Levy signed Tanning on as one of his artists, and three years later, in 1944, Tanning had her first one-woman show at his gallery. While preparing for this show, Tanning became involved with Surrealist painter Max Ernst and she spent the summer of 1943 with him in Sedona, Arizona. They so enjoyed Sedona that they decided to get married and move there in 1946.

Three years later, Tanning and Ernst moved to Paris, and in 1954, Tanning had her first solo exhibition there at the Galerie Furstenburg. The following year, she had a retrospective in London at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery. To have shown in the three epicenters of the contemporary art world by age forty-five was quite an accomplishment for a female artist. The majority of the works that Dorothea had created up until then were marked by precision and accuracy, strong lines and meticulous shading. Even if the scenes depicted were unrealistic and teeming with fantastic elements, they were figurative and recognizable, painted with a strict attention to detail and linear composition.

In 1955, Tanning began to abandon this somewhat controlled, representational style in favor of a freer technique marked by raw energy, vibrant hues, and luminosity. This new period in her work was originally called her "prismatic" period, perhaps because these images appear distorted and fractured, as if looking at them through a glass prism. A few years later, Tanning herself began to refer to these works as "Insomnias," a name taken from a painting she created in 1957 while living in Sedona. She explains:

Insomnias depicts a chaotic scene full of naked children and dogs thrashing around on a bed of crumpled white sheets. Tanning worked on this series full of movement and vivid hues until 1964. The last two works she painted in this style were Chiens de Cythere (Dogs of Cythera) in 1963 and Deux mots (Two Words) a year later. Both were enormous in scale, measuring nine feet in length, and like Insomnias from 1957, they depict frenzied scenes of struggle, yet it is unclear what the fight is about or who is truly involved.

Although this phase in Dorothea's painting began in Sedona, the majority of them were made in France. Ernst was forced to leave the United States in 1958 due to McCarthy-era legislation, so the couple moved to France where they split time between Paris and Huismes, a small village in the Loire valley. It was in Huismes that film maker Jean Desvilles shot a film on Tanning's work, entitled Le Regard ebloui (The Astonished Gaze): The paintings of Dorothea Tanning. This film helped to enhance Tanning's reputation, and throughout the 1960s and 70s, she showed regularly at Le Point Cardinal in Paris, the Alexandre Iolas Gallery in New York and many other galleries in major European cities. In 1967, Knokke-le-Zoute, a small town in Belgium, hosted her first mid-career retrospective.

In 1969, Tanning began working on a group of soft cloth sculptures that she coined "real haute couture." Two years later, Tanning created one of the first-ever installation art pieces, called Hotel de Pavot 202 (Poppy Hotel, Room 202), in which these cloth sculptures, some of which resemble female bodies, others odd furniture, were installed in the walls and on the floor of a mock hotel room. A few years later, in 1974, Tanning had her largest show yet: a retrospective of her work at the Centre National d'Art Contamporain in Paris.

Yet this time of immense joy and prosperity was followed by sorrow when Ernst died in 1976. In 1980, she decided to move back to New York, where she worked on a series of prints, drawings, and collages, and large-scale paintings of imaginary flowers. Over the last fifteen years, Tanning has been honored with a series of career retrospectives in her home country, first at the New York Public Library in 1992, then at the Boston University Art Gallery in 1999, and most recently, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2000 in celebration of the museum's acquisition of her 1942 self-portrait entitled Birthday.

Today, Tanning lives in New York City, and included in her diverse and expansive oeuvre are two memoirs, a book of poems, and an exhaustive body of artwork. Now ninety-five, her spirit is as vibrant as ever.