Dorothea Tanning was an exceptionally diverse artist who distinguished herself as a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, writer and poet. The early period of her creativity was influenced by Surrealism, but she was later also inclined towards abstraction.
(...) Continue readingDorothea Tanning – A self-taught painter
Dorothea Tanning was born on 25 August 1910 in Galesburg in the US state of Illinois. The second of three daughters, Tanning received a good education and worked for a few months in the town library of Galesburg after leaving school before attending Knox College from 1928 to 1930. The growing longing for an artistic career motivated Dorothea Tanning to leave the college and her home to move to Chicago. There she studied at the art academy for just three weeks in 1930, before moving to New York, where she earned a living as a commercial artist whilst teaching herself to paint alongside. It was in New York that she first came into contact with Surrealism and Dadaism when she visited the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, organised by Alfred Barr in the Museum of Modern Art. The pictures displayed there had a considerable influence on her understanding of art. In 1941, she married the writer Homer Shannon following their eight year long relationship.
Surrealistic dream pictures of females
In 1943, Dorothea Tanning took part in the female-only exhibition 31 Women in Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of this Century with her enigmatic self-portrait Birthday. There she met Guggenheim’s husband, the painter Max Ernst, whom she went on to marry in 1946 in a dual ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills. Tanning found a friend and patron in the gallerist Julien Levy, who mediated her two solo exhibitions in 1944 and 1948. She drew inspiration for her dreamlike, consistently figurative paintings primarily from Gothic and Romantic stories she had read during her time as a librarian in Galesburg. In keeping with the tradition of Surrealism, she paid great attention to detail, with her erotic representations becoming less explicit and more subtle over time. In the 1950s, her paintings became increasingly fragmented – she herself described it as a “splintering of her canvases”. In the 1960s, she evolved almost completely to abstraction, although the female form remained an inherent element of her work.
Ever-increasing artistic activity
As well as paintings, Dorothea Tanning created stage sets and costumes for ballet performances, the first in 1946, Night Shadow (La Sonnambula) by George Balanchine. She also pursed her interest in literature and wrote prose and poems throughout her life, with her second volume of poetry, Coming to That, published at the age of 100 in 2011. Dorothea Tanning took part in Documenta II in Kassel in 1959; in the 1970s, she took a break from painting for several years and concentrated on three-dimensional works with fabric collages as well as working with print graphics and sculpture. As declarations of love, her husband Max Ernst created thirty -six 3-D paintings until his death in 1976, in honour of her birthdays, wedding anniversaries and jubilees.
Dorothea Tanning died on 31 January 2012 in New York City.
Dorothea Tanning - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz: