Dorothy Iannone

Dorothy Iannone – Studies in literature and first attempts at painting

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1933, Dorothy Iannone lost her father at the age of two and was brought up by her mother. She studied American literature from 1953 to 1957 at Boston University, acquiring a Bachelor of Arts, and went on to study English literature in 1958 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. That same year, Iannone married the painter James Upham and moved with him to New York. She taught herself the basics of painting and worked as a fine artist with her husband for several years and the couple ran the Stryke Gallery in New York between 1963 and 1967 where she also exhibited her own work many times. Whilst Iannone made attempts at non-representational painting at the beginning of her artistic career, she quickly found her way to representational depictions in which erotic themes took centre stage. 

Dieter Roth as male muse

In the 1960s, Dorothy Iannone travelled to Europe and Asia several times with her husband. During a stay in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik, she met the Swiss poet and performance artist Dieter Roth, began a love affair with him, and divorced her husband. As a direct result of this development, she published a piquant literary art project: a book in which she listed all the men with whom she had been intimate. Literary provocations were nothing new for Dorothy Iannone at this time: she had already taken legal action against the ban on Henry Miller's erotic novels in 1961 and succeeded in having it lifted. Dieter Roth became an important point of departure and reference for Dorothy Iannone's artistic work and she created several pictures in which she thematised their relationship in sometimes explicitly sexual depictions. The Kunsthalle Bern wanted to show Dorothy Iannone's provocative work in 1970, but when the clearly visible genitals were to be covered with adhesive tape, Iannone and Roth cancelled their participation in protest and the curator in charge, Harald Szeemann, announced his resignation.

Recurring conflicts with censorship

Dorothy Iannone and Dieter Roth joined the Fluxus movement around Emmett Williams, Daniel Spoerri and Robert Filliou, although Iannone later distanced herself clearly from this movement and sought her own path. Due to the explicit erotic nature of her works, the artist repeatedly came into conflict with the censors, but did not allow this to dissuade her from her views and artistic principles and often complemented her paintings with video installations featuring erotic scenes. In 1976, a DAAD scholarship enabled her to stay in Berlin, where she has lived ever since. Although Iannone never adopted feminist-emancipatory dogmas, she is considered an important representative of feminist art with her endeavours for sexual liberation and the strengthening of individual female identity.

Dorothy Iannone lives and works in Berlin.