Tanning was at once composer of iconic images, a multimedia experimenter whose unchanging subjects are women’s dreams, fears and domestic conditions, and she lived to an age advanced enough to allow ...claims — as for recently anointed stars Maria Lassnig, who died aged 94 in 2014, or 103-year-old Carmen Herrera — for a late style somehow connected with female longevity. Most famous are “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, depicting two doll-like girls in silk and taffeta on a hotel landing with an enormous sunflower, so dynamically painted that it seems to sway and slither along the red-carpeted corridor lined with doors, and “Birthday”: a self-portrait in a theatrical lacy costume, skirt trailing seaweed, with a winged lemur, emblem of the spirit world, before an infinitely receding passage of opening doors. Over the next half-century, less famously, Tanning went on to make soft textile comic/menacing figures: the twisting pink flannel and fur-covered couple in “Étreinte” (Embrace); a round belly emerging from a froth of dirty lace in “Emma”, named for Flaubert’s frustrated Madame Bovary; a pink fabric nipple on a stick, like a lollipop, “Traffic Sign”.
In my view, it was just the type of exchange that demonstrates why Dorothea Tanning founded the archive 15 years ago to help museum professionals, as well as students, scholars, journalists, ...collectors and others, learn more about her work.
Dorothea Tanning, is, of course, a prominent surrealist artist, which explains her goofy, absinthe-drip writing style. But nothing can forgive such Elinor Glyn-soaked passages as the following, which ...is meant to tell us how Albert feels after an inexplicably strained meeting with Destina (cue the theremin): " ... old questions, like stone flags that hung in the air absurdly suspended, stones in levitation, of all shapes, weightless against the limpid backdrop of the void. It was his collection. He, Albert, collector of stone questions. Lying in their velvet depths, his perhaps precious stones?" Black & White Photo: BOOK COVER: Chasm: a Weekend by Dorothea Tanning; Black & White Photo: Tate Gallery, The New York Times / Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, painted in 1943 and...; Black & White Photo: Chester Higgins, Jr., The New York Times / ...the artist in front of another of her paintings, Tableau Vivant. Tanning was one of the original members of the Surrealist art movement in Paris in the 1920s.
Dorothea Tanning Kasmin | 297 Tenth Avenue The show here by Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), “Doesn’t the Paint Say It All?,” was being billed by Kasmin as “the most comprehensive solo presentation of ...her work for US audiences in decades.” According to the art-historical literature attending the work, the title is a punning homage to nineteenth-century artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, whose canvas Les océanides (naiades de la mer) (The Oceanids Naiads of the Sea), ca. 1860, Tanning would acquire in 2001. In 1987, Tanning, haunted by a reproduction of a painting of a flower field seen in an obscure artist’s catalogue decades prior, painted On Avalon.
