Dorothea Tanning
(August 25, 1910 - ) |
|
Art Work
| Name: |
Dorothea Tanning |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Galesburg, Illinois, USA |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
August 25, 1910 |
| Death: |
|
| Website: |
|
| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
|
|
Quick Facts
| Known For: |
|
| Medium: |
|
| Method: |
|
| Style: |
Surrealism |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
Printmaking
Sculpture |
|
|
Biography
Dorothea Tanning moved from her home in Illinois to New York in 1935. Although she was already a painter, she had to support herself by working as a commercial artist. A year later, the seminal exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism was held at the Museum of Modern Art. The work on show chimed with Tanning's own artistic inclinations, and after the outbreak of war she met a number of the Surrealist artists in exile, including Max Ernst, whom she married. She participated in a Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, Paris, in 1947
Although Tanning shares the Surrealist interest in the exploration of the psyche, her focus on images of the female body develops its representation beyond the work of her colleagues. Her paintings of the 1940s, such as Bine Kleine Nachtmusik and Palaestra (1949, private collection), show girls with unkempt streaming hair who have torn and crumpled their late-Victorian dresses. Their eerie presence dominates the gloomy corridors they inhabit. In the work in the Tate Collection the girls have ripped a monstrous sunflower apart. The paintings represent developing female sexuality as powerful and destructive. They also recall the violence of some children's games and stones (also explored by Paula Rego). By contrast, in Maternity (1946-7, Private Collection), an unhappy, isolated woman is trapped with a baby in a landscape of endless desolation.
In a self-portrait of 1942, given the title Birthday by Ernst, Tanning showed herself unlocking a door leading into halls full of other unlocked doors. The work can be read as a representation of Tanning's desire to reveal the hidden recesses of interior life in her art. She used the title of the painting as the title of her autobiography (Santa Monica, California 1986), in which she described a long career embracing design for the ballet, printmaking, and, when she was in her late fifties, a move into sculpture, using fabric and needlework. Her 1974 retrospective at the Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Paris included these soft sculptures, housed in a hotel room she had constructed. Further retrospectives have been held at the New York Public Library (1992) and at the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art (2001), which included her 'imaginary flower portraits' painted in her eighty-eighth year.
|
Samples of Work
|
|
