Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Tanning was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer and poet, whose early work was influenced by Surrealism. Born (to Swedish immigrant parents), and raised, in Galesburg, Illinois she attended Knox College between 1928 and 1930. After two years of college, she quit to pursue an artistic career, moving first to Chicago in 1930 and then to New York in 1935, where she supported herself as a commercial artist while working on her own painting. Apart from three weeks spent at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art in 1930, Tanning was a self-taught artist. The surreal imagery of her paintings from the 1940s and her close friendships with artists and writers of the Surrealist Movement have led many to regard Tanning as a Surrealist painter, yet she developed her own individual style over the course of an artistic career that spanned six decades.

In New York Tanning discovered Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. In 1941, impressed by her creativity and talent in illustrating fashion advertisements, the art director at Macy’s department store introduced her to the gallery owner Julien Levy (1906–1981, art dealer and owner of Julien Levy Gallery in New York City, important as a venue for Surrealists, avant-garde artists, and American photographers in the 1930s and 1940s), who immediately offered to show her work. Levy gave Tanning two solo exhibitions (in 1944 and 1948) and introduced her to the circle of émigré Surrealists whose work he was showing in his New York gallery, including the German painter Max Ernst (1891 – 1976).

Tanning first met Ernst at a party in 1942. Later he dropped by her studio to consider her work for inclusion in the 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century Gallery in New York, which was owned by Peggy Guggenheim (1898 – 1979), Ernst’s wife at the time. As Tanning recounts in her memoirs, he was enchanted by her iconic self-portrait Birthday (1942, oil on canvas, 102.2 x 64.8 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition, purchased with funds contributed by C.K. Williams, II, 1999). The two played chess, fell in love, and embarked on a life together that took them to Arizona, and later to France. They lived in New York for several years, however, before moving to Arizona, where they built a house and hosted visits from many friends crossing the country, including photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) and Lee Miller (1907 – 1977), art historian Sir Roland Penrose (1900 – 1984, major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom), surrealist painter Yves Tanguy (1900 – 1955) and Welsh poet and author Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953). Tanning and Ernst tied the knot in 1946 (in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Hollywood) and they were married for 30 years.

During this period she formed enduring friendships with, among others, Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968), Joseph Cornell (1903 – 1972) and John Cage (1912 – 1992). She also designed sets and costumes for several of George Balanchine’s (1904 – 1983, Georgian American ballet choreographer, recognized as one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th century. Styled as the father of American ballet, he co-founded the New York City Ballet and remained its artistic director for more than 35 years) ballets, including The Night Shadow (the original version of his ballet La Sonnambula, which premiered in 1946 at City Center of Music and Drama in New York), and performed in two of Hans Richter’s (1888 – 1976, German Dada painter, graphic artist, avant-garde film producer and art historian) avant-garde films, Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) and 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957).

In 1949, Tanning and Ernst relocated to France, where they divided their time between Paris and Touraine, returning to Sedona, Arizona for intervals through the early and mid-1950s. They lived in Paris, and later Provence, until Ernst’s death in 1976 (he had suffered a stroke a year earlier), after which Tanning returned to New York and embarked on an energetic creative period in which she produced paintings, drawings, collages, and prints. She continued to create studio art in the 1980s, then turned her attention to her writing and poetry in the 1990s and 2000s, working and publishing until the end of her life.

Tanning’s focus on writing was encouraged by her friend, and mentor, James Merrill (1926 – 1995, American poet, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for Divine Comedies, and for many years Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets). In 1986, she published her first memoir, entitled Birthday (for the painting that had figured so prominently in her biography). It has since been translated into four other languages. In 2001, she wrote an expanded version of her memoir called Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. Her poems were published regularly in literary reviews and magazines such as The Yale Review,Poetry, The Paris Review and the New Yorker until the end of her life. A collection of her poems, A Table of Content, and a short novel, Chasm: A Weekend, were both published in 2004. Her second collection of poems, Coming to That, was published by Graywolf Press in 2011. In 1994, Tanning endowed the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, an annual prize of $100,000 awarded to a poet in recognition of outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.

In 1997, The Dorothea Tanning Foundation was established, with a purpose dedicated to preserving the artist’s legacy and fostering a broader public understanding of the artist’s art, writing, and poetry. The Foundation works in tandem with The Destina Foundation, established in New York, 2015, to manage and distribute the art and assets of Dorothea Tanning’s Estate for philanthropic purposes.

Tanning’s work has been recognized in numerous one-person exhibitions, both in the United States and in Europe, including major retrospectives in 1974 at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Paris (which later became the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977), and in 1993 at the Malmö Konsthall in Malmö, Sweden and then at the Camden Arts Centre in London. The New York Public Library mounted a retrospective of Tanning’s prints in 1992, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted a small retrospective exhibition in 2000 entitled Birthday and Beyond to mark its acquisition of Tanning’s celebrated 1942 self-portrait, Birthday. In 2018, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, held a major exhibition of the artist’s work, curated by Alyce Mahon (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom), which travelled to the Tate Modern, London in 2019.

Tanning died on 31 January 2012, at her Manhattan home at age 101.

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