Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Tanning, b. Galesburg, Ill., Aug. 25, 1910

Tanning learned to paint, she claimed, by visiting art museums. She attended Knox College in Galesburg, studied art in Chicago, and in 1935 moved to New York City, where she supported herself with advertising art and painted in her spare time. A commercial artist in New York, she began painting as a professional after meeting a group of French surrealist painters that included Max Ernst, whom she married in 1946. Tanning's paintings have evolved from her early surrealist evocations of perverse children's games and fantasies to experiments with different painting and, later, sculptural approaches--although her involvement with symbolic and dream material has remained constant. Her Hotel du Pavot, an installation in cloth sculpture, is in the permanent collection of the Beaubourg Museum in Paris.

Ein klein nachtmusik 1946; "A little night music"

http://www.ibiblio.org/louvre/paint/auth/tanning/

Study for "Still in the Studio", 1977, shows the preliminary stage of an oil painting Tanning completed in 1979. The title of the finished piece, Still in the Studio, describes threes aspect of the painting -- a still life made up of paints, jars, and brushes, the quiet and inactivity of her Paris studio just before she returned to New York to live, and the fact that she had not altogether left her Paris studio -- part of her is still there. In the final painting, an amorphous figure seems to emanate from the figure like smoke, or like a genie rising from a lantern. The painting that evolved from the study marked a turning point in Tanning's life and work and is featured in the exhibition at the BU Art Gallery.

click here for a more text regarding this
1999 Boston University show

Notes for an Apocalypse, 1978
oil on canvas

also from the B.U. show:
click here for another review & biography

Cousins

synthetic fur over cotton stuffing and wood base

60 x 25 x 21 in.

1970

Tanning, Dorothea (1910-)

American painter and graphic artist, born in Galesburg, Illinois. After a brief period at Knox College she left school for Chicago, where she attended the Chicago Academy of Arts for two weeks. Convinced that one cannot learn to be a painter, she moved to New York and immersed herself in literature and art-Faulkner, Joyce, Stendhal, Picasso, Braque, Matisse. Inspired by the Museum of Modern Art's 1937 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, she went to Paris and Stockholm (1939-41). She first exhibited in the year she returned to the United States, at the Julien Levy Gallery. In 1944 she had her first one-man show there. Her early canvases are blatantly Surreal, rendered in a meticulous technique and filled with inexplicable elements and strange figural actions.

La Mysticite Charnelle de Rene Crevel
Medium: Etching. Image size: 10 1/4" x 7 13/16"

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/tanning_dorothea.html

From September 6 to October 13, 2001, Zabriskie gallery
exhibits drawings, collages, "and a sculpture" by Dorothea Tanning. Covering a selection of work over a wide range of years in her distinguished career, these two and three-dimensional pieces offer another perspective into tanning's highly individualized realm of imagery and iconography derived from somewhere along the margins of the conscious, often revealing the experience of the human body in an array of charged configurations - sexualized, fragmented, obscured, abstracted, and so on.

http://www.zabriskiegallery.com/Tanning/2001%20exhibit/tanning%20press%20release%202001.html

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