Dorothea Tanning
Born – Galesburgh, Illinois, USA 1912
Dorothea Tanning worked as a librarian before briefly studying art at Knox College, Illinois. Desperate to escape the narrow confines of her home town, twenty-year-old Tanning left for Chicago, where she took evening classes at art school. In 1936 she moved to New York, where she found work as a commercial artist. Her meticulous and detailed canvases, with their elaborate depictions of childhood fantasies and nightmares brought her into contact with the Surrealists; she married Max Earnst in 1946. As a female Surrealist, Tanning used her reconstruction of the dream world to explore her own sexuality. A Little Night Music is an image resonant with nubile sexuality. Two girls are featured on an upstairs landing, their dresses cut to ribbons and their long hair streaming. A giant sunflower blocks the staircase, its petals discarded. The image is static, as if frozen in time, recalling, perhaps, memories of a distant childhood. Later work, from the mid-1950s onward, focuses on roundly modelled parts of the body – limbs, heads and torsos – which merge with the picture space, appealing to a sense of touch as well as to sight.
Masterpieces:
- A Very Happy Picture
- A Family Portrait
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.
Books About dorothea tanning
Between Lives: An Artist and Her World
Dorothea Tanning
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Coming to That: Poems
Dorothea Tanning
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Dorothea Tanning: Insomnias 1954-1965
Charles Stuckey and Richard Howard
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