Dorothea Margaret Tanning (25 August 1910 – 31 January 2012) was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Her early work was influenced by

Surrealism Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...

Biography

Dorothea Tanning was born and raised in

Galesburg, Illinois Galesburg is a city in Knox County, Illinois, United States. The city is northwest of Peoria, Illinois, Peoria. At the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census, its population was 32,195. It is the county seat of Knox County and the principal cit ...

. She was the second of three daughters to Andrew Peter Tanning (born Andreas Peter Georg Thaning; 1875–1943) and Amanda Marie Hansen (1879–1967), who named her for her maternal grandmother. Both of her parents were immigrants from Sweden. After graduating from Galesburg Public High School in 1926, Tanning worked in the Galesburg Public Library (1927) and attended Knox College (1928–1930). After two years of college she quit to pursue an artistic career, moving first to

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

in 1930 and then to New York in 1935, where she supported herself as a commercial artist while working on her own painting. Tanning was married briefly to the writer Homer Shannon in 1941, after an eight-year relationship. In New York, Tanning discovered

at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

'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, who immediately offered to show her work. (Tanning would also become good friends with Levy and his wife, the painter Muriel Streeter, as seen in letters they exchanged in the 1940s.) Levy gave Tanning two solo exhibitions (in 1944 and 1948), and also introduced her to the circle of émigré Surrealists whose work he was showing in his New York gallery, including the German painter

Max Ernst Max Ernst (; 2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic trai ...

. 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, Ernst's wife at the time. As Tanning recounts in her memoirs, he was enchanted by her iconic self-portrait ''Birthday'' (1942,

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an List of art museums#North America, art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at ...

). The two played chess, fell in love, and embarked on a life together that took them to Sedona in Arizona, and later to France. They lived in New York for several years before moving to Sedona, where they built a house and hosted visits from many friends crossing the country, including

Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson (; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004) was a French artist and Humanist photography, humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 135 film, 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street ...

, Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Balanchine, and Dylan Thomas. Tanning and Ernst were married in 1946 in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Hollywood, and they were married for 30 years. In 1949, Tanning and Ernst relocated to France, where they divided their time between Paris and Touraine, returning to Sedona 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. 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 died on 31 January 2012, at her Manhattan home at age 101. 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.

Artistic career

Apart from three weeks she 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. Tanning's early works—paintings such as ''Birthday'' and ''Eine Kleine Nachtmusik'' (1943, Tate Modern, London)—were precise figurative renderings of dream-like situations. Tanning read many Gothic and Romantic novels from her local library in her hometown of Galesburg. These fantastical stories, filled with imagery of the imaginary, heavily influenced her style and subject matter for years to come. Like other Surrealist painters, she was meticulous in her attention to details and in building up surfaces with carefully muted brushstrokes. Through the late 1940s, she continued to paint depictions of unreal scenes, some of which combined erotic subjects with enigmatic symbols and desolate space. During this period she formed enduring friendships with, among others, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...

. She also designed sets and costumes for several of George Balanchine's 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 avant-garde films, '' Dreams That Money Can Buy'' (1947) and '' 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements'' (1957). Over the next decade, Tanning's painting evolved, becoming less explicit and more suggestive. Now working in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

and Huismes, France, she began to move away from Surrealism and develop her own style. During the mid-1950s, her work radically changed and her images became increasingly fragmented and prismatic, exemplified in works such as ''Insomnias'' (1957, Moderna Museet,

Stockholm Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately ...

). As she explains, "Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered... I broke the mirror, you might say". By the late 1960s, Tanning’s paintings were almost completely abstract, yet always suggestive of the female form. From 1969 to 1973, Tanning embarked on what she described as "an intense five-year adventure in soft sculpture," concentrating on a body of three-dimensional works in fabric, a departure from traditional, harder, longer-lasting sculptural materials. In an interview, she stated that her soft sculptures signified 'cloth as a material for high purpose' and rejoiced at 'softness over hardness'. Five of these soft or 'living' sculptures comprise the installation ''Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202'' (1970–73) that is now in the permanent collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. During her time in France in the 1950s to 1970s, Tanning also became an active printmaker, working in ateliers of Georges Visat and Pierre Chave and creating work for a number of limited edition artists' books by such poets as Alain Bosquet, Rene Crevel, Lena Leclerq, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. After her husband's death in 1976, Tanning remained in France for several years with a renewed concentration on her painting. By 1980, she had relocated her home and studio to New York and embarked on an energetic creative period in which she produced paintings, drawings, collages, and prints. 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 became the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977), and in 1993 at the Malmö Konsthall in 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

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 Sofía, Madrid, held a major exhibition of the artist’s work, curated by Alyce Mahon, which travelled to the

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

, London in 2019.

Literary career

Tanning wrote stories and poems throughout her life, with her first short story published in '' VVV'' in 1943 and original poems accompanying her etchings in the limited edition books ''Demain'' (1964) and ''En chair et en or'' (1973). However, it was after her return to New York in the 1980s that she began to focus on her writing. 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''. With the encouragement of her friend and mentor James Merrill (who was for many years Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets),Poetry Foundation
Dorothea Tanning, 1910-2012
online biography, accessed 18 May 2013. Tanning began to write her own poetry in her 80s, and her poems were published regularly in literary reviews and magazines such as '' The Yale Review'', ''

Poetry Poetry (from the Greek language, Greek word ''poiesis'', "making") is a form of literature, literary art that uses aesthetics, aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meaning (linguistics), meanings in addition to, or in ...

'', '' The Paris Review'', and ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

'' 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.

Bibliography

Books by Dorothea Tanning

* ''Abyss''. New York: Standard Editions, 1977. * ''Birthday''. Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1986. (memoir)
''Between Lives: An Artist and Her World''
New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. (memoir) * ''Chasm: A Weekend''. New York: Overlook Press, and London: Virago Press, 2004. (novel) * ''A Table of Content: Poems''. New York: Graywolf Press, 2004. (collection of poems) * ''Coming to That: Poems'', New York: Graywolf Press, 2011. (collection of poems)

Monographs

* Bosquet, Alain. ''La Peinture de Dorothea Tanning''. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1966. * Plazy, Giles. ''Dorothea Tanning''. Paris: Editions Filipacchi, 1976 and (English translation) 1979. * ''Dorothea Tanning: Numéro Spécial de XXe Siècle''. Paris: Editions XXe Siècle, 1977. * Bailly, Jean Christopher, John Russell, and Robert C. Morgan. ''Dorothea Tanning''. New York: George Braziller, 1995. * McAra, Catriona. ''A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm''. London: Routledge, 2017. * Carruthers, Victoria. ''Dorothea Tanning: Transformations''. London: Lund Humphries, 2020. * Lyford, Amy. ''Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning''. London: Reaktion Books, 2024.

Exhibition catalogues

* Waldberg, Patrick. ''Dorothea Tanning, Casino Communal, XXe Festival Belge D'Été.'' Brussels: André de Rache, 1967. * Jouffroy. Alain. ''Dorothea Tanning: Oeuvre.'' Paris: Centre National D'Art Contemporain, 1974. * ''Dorothea Tanning: 10 Recent Paintings and a Biography''. New York: Gimpel-Weitzenhoffer Gallery, 1979. * ''Dorothea Tanning on Paper, 1948-1986''. New York: Kent Fine Art, 1987. * ''Eleven Paintings by Dorothea Tanning''. New York: Kent Fine Art, 1988. * ''Dorothea Tanning: Between Lives--Works on Paper''. London: Runkel-Hue-Williams Ltd., 1989. * Waddell, Roberta, and Louisa Wood Ruby, eds., with texts by Donald Kuspit and Dorothea Tanning. ''Dorothea Tanning: Hail Delirium! A Catalogue Raisonné of the Artist’s Illustrated Books and Prints, 1942-1991''. New York: The New York Public Library, 1992. * Nordgren, Sune, John Russell, Alain Jouffroy, Jean-Christophe Bailly, and Lasse Söderberg. ''Dorothea Tanning: Om Konst Kunde Tala (If Art Could Talk)''. Malmö, Sweden: Malmö Konsthall, 1993. * ''Dorothea Tanning: Insomnias, Paintings from 1954 to 1965''. New York: Kent Fine Art, 2005. * ''Dorothea Tanning: Beyond the Esplanade: Paintings, Drawings and Prints from 1940 to 1965''. San Francisco: Frey Norris Gallery, 2009. * Greskovic, Robert, Joanna Kleinberg, and Rachel Liebowitz. ''Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage''. New York: The Drawing Center, 2010. * ''Dorothea Tanning: Unknown but Knowable States''. San Francisco: Gallery Wendi Norris, 2013. * ''Dorothea Tanning: Web of Dreams.'' London: Alison Jacques Gallery, 2014. * Mahon, Alyce, ed., with Ann Coxon and Idoia Murga Castro. ''Dorothea Tanning.'' Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2018 and London: Tate Publishing, 2018. * ''Dorothea Tanning: Doesn't the Paint Say It All?'' New York: Kasmin Gallery, 2022.

Interviews

In a 2002 interview for '' Salon.com'' in response to: "So what have you tried to communicate as an artist? What were your goals, and have you achieved them?" Tanning replies: "I’d be satisfied with having suggested that there is more than meets the eye." And in response to: "What do you think of some of the artwork being produced today?" Tanning replies: "I can’t answer that without enraging the art world. It’s enough to say that most of it comes straight out of dada, 1917. I get the impression that the idea is to shock. So many people laboring to outdo Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t even shocking anymore, just kind of sad." When speaking on her relationship with Ernst in an interview, Tanning said: "I was a loner, am a loner, good Lord, it's the only way I can imagine working. And then when I hooked up with Max Ernst, he was clearly the only person I needed and, I assure you, we never, never talked art. Never." "If it wasn’t known that I had been a Surrealist, I don’t think it would be evident in what I’m doing now. But I’m branded as a Surrealist. ''Tant pis''."McCormick, 1990. "Women artists. There is no such thing—or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as "man artist" or "elephant artist". You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you." "Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity."