Inspired by the greatly stimulating psycho-dramas of gothic and erotic fiction and the revolutionary potential of Surrealism, Dorothea Tanning renovates images which aim to go into the nature of ...feminine (and infancy) sensual and corporal experience, falling down the frontier between the real world and imagination pro a smooth inventive world wherein all odds can imaginably exist. The most famous work of Tanning art is perhaps the one from the 1940s where the artist utilizes a specific vivid approach to represent eroticism. Nevertheless, in deviating from this method to a further theoretical way, the woman artist scatters her wish to depict the gothic just as she was illustrating a gothic tale, to remind the gothic appreciation of difference and disintegration via pensiveness. An erotic charge throbs throughout Tanning’s work; youthful girls’ clothes seem ragged and hair tackled a lavish life of its own as the boundary between inexperience and knowledge becomes blurred. A power rises above the specifically erotic and turns out to be a more broad desire to live in any of its demonstrations.
This essay explores the concern in Dorothea Tanning's work of the late 1960s and early 1970s with touch, contiguity, and the concept of maternity. In addition to a series of paintings and drawings ...that connote intimacy and whose titles allude to maternity, during this period Tanning also gave form to a group of soft sculptures, which similarly evince a preoccupation with closeness and touch, and indicate a form of intimacy that challenges the limits of the individual subject. Tanning's engagement with these themes, the essay argues, resonates closely with the feminist poetics developed around the same time by poststructuralist theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. I propose that Irigaray's theories of maternity, subjectivity, and non‐phallocentric language offer a particularly rich set of analytical tools with which to understand Tanning's work. Through establishing the affinities between Tanning and Irigaray, I suggest, we can better understand the intellectual currents that flowed between poststructuralist feminism and surrealist women's work of this period.
Dorothea Tanning's painting Fatala (1947) reveals a solitary female figure reaching her hand through a door. This borrows plainly from an artist renowned for rendering women as statues or storefront ...mannequins: the Greek-born Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose early corpus formed one of Surrealism's most prominent-and fraught-precedents. Yet Tanning's canvas also conjures up another of the Surrealists' elected forebears: Marcel Allain's series of detective fiction books, titled Fatala: Grand roman policier (1930-31). Co-authored with Pierre Souvestre, Allain's first series of pulp novels, Fantômas (1911-13),had proven enormously popular in Parisian avant-garde circles, first in the circle of the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire, and later among the Surrealists. Michel Nathan has described Allain's Fatala as "Fantômas in a walking skirt" ("Fantômas en jupe trotteuse"). This cast-off epithet offers a fitting aegis under which to consider both Tanning's use of various Surrealist modes in Fatala and their resonance in the context of the movement's late iterations and sexual politics. For with Fatala, Tanning takes on a higher mathematics of masculine precedent-both Metaphysical painting and the detective novel-as well as their adoption by a host of male Surrealist artists. It is on the male-centered ground of the Metaphysical cityscape and the roman policier that Tanning sets her femme fatale in Fatala, finding in it a readymade stage for the apparition of other identities.
A celebrated surrealist artist, Dorothea Tanning is also the author of a few literary publications that reveal the constant mirroring between painting and literature in her work. Her only novel, ...Chasm: A Weekend reflects many of the artist’s predilect themes and metaphors, among which childhood stands out as a recurrent artistic obsession. This paper investigates the metamorphoses and mutations of the infantile in Dorothea Tanning’s novel, focusing on the particularities of an unusual dialogue between plastic representation and literature.
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