Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012)

Birthday. 1942

    Dorothea Tanning´s birthday was, in fact, this past Saturday, August 25. She produced some of my favourite paintings and it´s a pity she isn´t better known. (Also, since The Guardian claimed rather bizarrly in a recent article that Lee Miller was the "lone woman within the surrealist scene" I guess I`ll be posting about some of them here. Lee Miller is amazing, her photography hypnotising and moving, but there were literally dozens of women involved in some degree with the "surrealist scene". Rant over.)

Eine kleine Nachtmusik. 1943

       The paintings above are from the mid-40s, her first splash of popularity when she lived and worked in New York (she was born in Galesburg, Illinois, which according to Wikipedia had about 22.000 inhabitants at the time). Both are typical of the mood in her art at the time, dreamy, suggestive, an illusion of soft, undulating movement about to leave the frame.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1945

It was also there that she met her future husband, Max Ernst,  who introduced her "officially" into the surrealist group. The pair later moved to Arizona and then to France. They remained married until Ernst`s death. The painting on the left was her contribution to a Hollywood artistic competition for the otherwise unremarkable The Private Affairs of Bel Ami. Many contemporary artists took part, among them Ernst, Dali, Paul Delvaux or Leonora Carrington (Ernst won).
    In later decades, her paintings became increasingly abstract, although she always maintained the same aura of sensuality and an elegant, almost suggestive palette.

Below are two of her paintings on the same topics, motherhood, that show her evolution quite well: Maternity from 1946 on the left and Blue Mum from 1994 on the right