DOROTHEA
TANNING.
The last Of
the surrealists.
DOROTHEA
“A biography, for me, if it isnʼt a flagrant lie is, at best, a distorting mirror.”
Dorothea and her mother
I l l i n o i s , 1 9 11
Amanda Tanning,
Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois, USA, where, she once said, 'nothing happens but the wallpaper'. She was the second out of three daughters of Amanda and Andrew Tanning, immigrants from Sweden who went to the ‘’Promised land’’ seeking for a prosperous life. Being a member of a closed-religious family, she tried to react against the dreary predictability of her environment. Thanks to Galesburg Public Library, she found her own gateway to her imaginary trips. Gothic and romantic literature, castles, maidens, ghosts and knights accompanied her in her first escapes to the other side of life. She later describes herself as ‘‘forever corrupted’’ by authors as Poe,
When she understood that painting was the field in which she could explain most of the things she was thinking, she attended some art classes in Knox College in her hometown before studying painting at Chicago Academy of Arts. Nevertheless, Dorothea was never quite satisfied by her studies, so she quitted Art school after two weeks , stating that nobody could teach her how to be an artist. According to Web Museum of Paris, Dorothea learned to paint by visiting art museums.
"My work is about leaving the door open to the imagination".
In 1935, she arrives in New York with $25 and a dream of being an artist. she started making a living doing advertising illustrations for the Chicago World’s Fair,a stand in at the Metropolitan Opera,and being a puppet animator for show while studying art and absorbing the art world of the city. It was in 1936 that her life changed dramatically. After visiting the current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, named ‘’Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism’’, Dorothea discovered that other people shared her vision. As she claimed this exhibition turned out to be "the real
explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels. Here is the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY, signposts so imperious, so laden, so seductive and, yes, so perverse that, like the insidious revelations of the Galesburg Public Library, they would possess me utterly." She had found in the European movement called "Surrealism" inspiration for her own artistic creativity.
the
DOROTHEA STUDIO
New York. L e e M i l l e r, 1 9 4 6
At her
DOROTHEA & MaX
•Man Ray,Juliet
After enjoying the work of other people, Dorothea started painting her own surreal paintings. Julien Levy, after seeing her work he immediately offered to show the extraordinary paintings at his own gallery.. Levy later gave Tanning two one-person exhibitions and introduces her to the circle of Surrealists who at the moment in order to avoid the war had moved to New York. In one of those ‘’closed events parties’’ of the Surrealists, Dorothea meets the famous at that time German painter Max Ernst in 1942. The most significant meeting, however, was when Ernst was sent to her
+
DoroThea&MaX in their double Wedding.
juliet-and-dorothea
house by his then wife Peggy Guggenheim to look at Tanning's paintings in anticipation of an exhibition in her gallery, Art of this Century. The exhibition was to be called, Thirty-One Women. Ernst fellt surprised both by Dorothea’s talent in painting and by her love for chess. So after challenging her in his first visit in her house for a game, he kept coming back every day that week to play more and more games and then, shortly after the week was over, he moved in. They got married in 1946, in a double wedding with Man
Ray and Juliet
Browner, and stayed together for 34 years, until Max’s death in 1976.
•Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
.....{ A
little
Night music}
There are a lot of different interpretations about this painting made by Dorothea in 1943. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ‘s title may be ironic, since it is borrowed from Mozart's most loved and lighthearted compositions, while the painting has dark sinister undertones. A mixture of childhood fantasies and nightmares taking place in a hotel corridor. ‘’An animated sunflower and pieces of its torn stem lie on the landing. Two fallen petals lie further down the stairs and a third is held by a doll propped against one of the doorways. The doll is remarkably life-like and wears similar clothing to the girl standing nearby. Her status as a toy is only revealed by her hairline and the regularly moulded contours of her torso. The tattered state of the clothes worn by both the doll and the girl suggests that there has been some sort of struggle or encounter with powerful forces, and the girl’s long hair streams upwards as if blasted by an immensely powerful gust of wind’’ A plethora of critics suggest that this painting symbolize the transition from childhood in the journey towards womanhood, like Breton analyzed in his book “Arkana 17’’. A woman was a child, and a child will be a woman, in an endless loop of events. Of course, there are a numerous other different suggestions which claim that this painting shows the deflowering of a child, with its large sunflower lying on the red hallway carpet. To continue with, there is a possibility that the combination of the images and the title of A Little Night Music could suggest sexual connotations.
As it may be obvious, Dorothea had an obsession with alternative choices, different pathways, everything in life can be different from what it is, you only have to explore the possibilities, and if life does not give you the option to live what is out there to be lived, then paint it. This is exactly what is happening in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik , appear in hotel-like corridors whose doors suggest a range of symbolic meanings - choices in life, openings to the world of the unconscious. The only door that is opened in this painting is offering a mysterious invitation. The little girls, and the disparities of scale between them, the doors and a giant wilting sunflower, also evoke the world of Alice in Wonderland, a book much admired by the Surrealists.
The art historian Whitney Chadwick has linked the violent wind blowing the girls' hair and clothes to Tanning's description of her birth as 'a day of high wind. A regular hurricane that blew down one of the three poplars in front of our house. My mother was terrified. So I was born'. Chadwick has also suggested that the composition of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was inspired by Danger on the Stairs 1927, a painting of a large snake on a staircase by the French Surrealist Pierre Roy. Tanning could have seen this work in the 1936 exhibition of Surrealist art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Chadwick writes that in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Tanning ‘removes the snake with its Freudian symbolic content, and replaces it with a torn and writhing sunflower, and image strongly identified with Tanning’s Midwestern origins, close to nature and capable of conveying impressions of both fecundity and menace However the resemblances between the paintings are not compelling. Tanning has firmly rejected this comparison: ‘To compare my vision with the perfectly proportioned and very photographic depiction of a snake (anaconda) on a stairs, neatly painted, somewhat in the manner of Magritte, is simple-minded. The scene, though infrequent, is possible in the natural outside world. Mine is not.’ (Whitney Chadwick,1998)
iN her OWN woRds . ‘’I see the sunflower in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik as ‘a symbol of all the things that youth has to face and to deal with,’ and has said that it represented the ‘neverending battle we wage with unknown forces, the forces that were there before our civilisation’. When painting, my mind is in a state of 'perpetual vertigo'. 'Everything is a miracle, iridescent, obsessive and alive. Everything is in motion. Also, behind the invisible door , another door.’’
You might say I lead a double life. Or a triple or multiple life. In fact, outside my studio, I am not who I to be. ‘’
pretend
“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.�
I had the pleasure to be able to see that painting last spring in Tate Modern Gallery, when visiting the ‘’Poetry and Dream: Surrealism and Beyond’’ exhibition. Dorothea was one from my favorite painter since my teenage hood. But I did not have the chance to absorve the beauty of her work face to face. So far, I only knew the basic information about her, but this controversial painting made my imagination fly beyond the skies of my subconscious. ‘'Maybe it is the magic of Oil on canvas’’, I thought, but then it came to my mind that this is not that kind of magic that we are talking about here. It is the magic of the eternal unknown, that this painter was one of the first to realize it; by painting what her brain’s eyes were capturing. The fear of the things that we do not see, but they are surviving inside our souls, just waiting for the right time in order to attack us. All philosophy is based on elements that human beings are not able to see with their bare eyes;ideas, notions, thoughts, some times even feelings. Religion followed the same strategy, by feeding people with stereotypes of universal love, faith and hope. Then psychology entered the game, suggesting that we are afraid mostly of elements which we are considered to take for granted in our lives, although our brains don’t seem to digest.
Dreams, the mirror of our inside. Were all the dark secrets, obsessions, and insanities live.
Bibliography. Caws, M.A., Kuenzli, R.E., and Raeburg,G. Surrealism and Women, MIT Press, 1991. Whitney Chadwick, Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, MIT Press, 1998. Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors, October, MIT Press, 1999. Jennifer Mundy, ed. Surrealism: Desire Unbound, Tate Publishing Ltd, 2001. Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, 2001 Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, Santa Monica: Lapis Press,1986 Dorothea Tanning, exhibition catalogue, Malmö Konsthall 1993 Jean Christophe Bailly and Robert C. Morgan, Dorothea Tanning, New York 1996
Melville, Robert, “The Snake on the Dining Room Table,” View 6 (May 1946) Jean, Marcel. Histoire de la Peinture Surréaliste. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1959, Melville, Robert. “Miscellany/Exhibitions: Painting and Drawing Violence.” The Architectural Review ʻʼ
Waldberg, Patrick. “Dorothea Tanning et Les Enfants de La Nuit.” Dorothea Tanning, Casino Communal, XXe
Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors, October, MIT Press, 1999.
Pierre, José. “Dorothea Tanning.” Surrealism, a volume in the History of Art series, London: Heron Books, 1970,
SPECIAL THANKS TO DIMITRA VG