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Dorothea Tanning

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Omiyasaki (talk | contribs) at 14:02, 2 September 2013 (removed reference to Ernst's divorce (since couldn't have married otherwise). Ernst's and Guggenheim's martial history are in their bios, both linked to this page). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Dorothea Tanning
Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in 1948. Photo by Robert Bruce Inverarity in the Smithsonian Institution collection.
BornAugust 25, 1910
Galesburg, Illinois
DiedJanuary 31, 2012(2012-01-31) (aged 101)
Manhattan, New York
NationalityAmerican
Known forPainting, sculpture, printmaking, writing
MovementSurrealism
SpouseMax Ernst (1946–76)

Dorothea Margaret Tanning (August 25, 1910 – January 31, 2012) was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer. Her early work was influenced by Surrealism. She was also married to fellow Surrealist Max Ernst.

Early life

Dorothea Tanning was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois. After attending Knox College for two years (1928–30), she moved to Chicago in 1930 and then to New York in 1935. There she supported herself as a commercial artist while pursuing her own painting, and 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, who immediately offered to show her work. Levy later gave Tanning two one-person 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.[1]

Dorothea Tanning, Some Roses and their Phantoms, oil on canvas, 76.3 x 101.5cm, 1952, Tate Modern.

Life with Max Ernst

Tanning first met Ernst at a party in 1942. Later he dropped by her studio to consider her work for an exhibition of work by women artists at The Art of This Century gallery, which was owned by Peggy Guggenheim, Ernst's wife at the time. As Tanning recounts in her memoirs, the two played chess, fell in love, and embarked on a life together that soon took them to Sedona, Arizona, and later to France.

They married in 1946, in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Hollywood.[2] They remained married for 30 years until his death.

In 1949, Tanning and Ernst moved to France, where they divided their time between Paris, Touraine and later Provence. They would often host guest such as Balanchine, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcel Duchamp, Pavel Tchelitchew and Dylan Thomas. In 1957 Tanning and Ernst moved to France again because Max Ernst was denied citizenship as a German during the McCarthy era. 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."[3]

After Max Ernst died in 1979 Dorothea Tanning returned to the United States.

Career

The surreal imagery of Tanning’s 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 (1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Eine kleine Nachtmusik (1943, Tate Modern, London) - were precise figurative renderings of dream-like situations. 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. Living in New York City and Sedona, she formed enduring friendships with, among others, Marcel Duchamp, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, and George Balanchine, for whom she designed sets and costumes for several ballets, including The Night Shadow (1945) at the Metropolitan Opera House. She also appeared in two of Hans Richter's avant-garde films.

Over the next decade, Tanning's painting evolved, becoming less explicit and more suggestive. Now working in Paris and Huismes, France, she began to move away from Surrealism and develop her own unique 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). 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 concentrated on a body of three-dimensional work, soft, fabric sculptures, five of which 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-70s, Tanning also became an active printmaker, working in ateliers of Georges Visat and Pierre Chave and collaborating on a number of limited edition artists’ books with such poets as such 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 the at the Camden Art Center in London. The New York Public Library mounted a retrospective of Tanning's prints in 1992,[4] 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.

Writer and poet

Towards the end of her life, Tanning focused on her work as a writer and poet. In 1986, she published her memoir, also called Birthday, which has since been translated into four other languages, and in 2001, she wrote an expanded version of the memoir called Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. A collection of her poems, A Table of Content, and a short novel, Chasm: A Weekend, were both published in 2004.

Tanning continued to write poetry until her death, with poems appearing regularly in literary reviews and magazines such as The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. 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. (Tanning considered James Merrill, for many years Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, both her friend and mentor.[5])

Death

Tanning died on January 31, 2012, at her Manhattan home at age 101.[6][7]

Quotes

In a 2002 interview[8] 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."[9] 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."[10]

100th birthday

Her 100th birthday, on 25 August 2010, was marked by a number of exhibitions during the year:

  • Dorothea Tanning - Early Designs for the Stage - April 23 – July 23, 2010 – The Drawing Center, New York, USA[11]
  • Zwischen dem Inneren Auge und der Anderen Seite der Tür: Dorothea Tanning Graphiken - August 25, 2010 – January 30, 2011 – Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany[12]
  • Happy Birthday Dorothea Tanning - 5 July - 30 October 2010 - Maison Waldberg, Seillans, France[13]
  • Dorothea Tanning: 100 years – A Tribute - August 28 – September 22, 2010 – Galerie Bel’Art, Stockholm[14]
  • "Surréalisme, Dada et Fluxus" - Pour le 100ème anniversaire de Dorothea Tanning - 3–12 September 2010 - Espace d'Art, Rennes les Bains, France[15]
  • Beyond the Esplanade - November 19, 2009 to January 30, 2010 – Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco, USA

Collections

Bibliography

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)

See also

References

  1. ^ Tanning, Dorothea. Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
  2. ^ "Dorothea Tanning". The Daily Telegraph. 5 February 2012. Retrieved 5 February 2012. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |newspaper= (help)
  3. ^ McCormick, Carlo (fall 1990). "Dorothea Tanning". BOMB Magazine. 1990 (33). New Art Publications. Retrieved 2013-05-29. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ^ Waddell, Roberta, and Ruby, Louisa Wood, 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.
  5. ^ Poetry Foundation, Dorothea Tanning, 1910-2012, online biography, accesssed 18 May 2013.
  6. ^ Glueck, Grace (3 February 2012). "Dorothea Tanning, Surrealist Painter, Dies at 101". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 February 2012. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |newspaper= (help)
  7. ^ Needham, Alex (2 February 2012). "Dorothea Tanning, surrealist artist, dies aged 101". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 February 2012. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |newspaper= (help)
  8. ^ Salon; John Glassie; Feb. 11, 2002
  9. ^ Salon; John Glassie; Feb. 11, 2002
  10. ^ Salon; John Glassie; Feb. 11, 2002
  11. ^ http://www.drawingcenter.org/exh_past.cfm?exh=726
  12. ^ http://www.schlossbote.de/rag-vsw-sb/docs/264284/bruehl
  13. ^ http://www.cote.azur.fr/actualites/info_expositions-et-visites__10710_lang_es.htm
  14. ^ http://www.belart.se/exhibitions/render_exhibition?ex_id=101
  15. ^ http://www.audeculture.com/espacedart/espace-expo.html

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