By the time most of us would just be trying to get the most out of a discounted National Trust membership, Dorothea Tanning was still dreaming up new ways to express herself.
A major new exhibition at Tate Modern will bring the work of this boundlessly creative artist to a wider audience. Before her death at the age of 101 in 2012, Tanning’s most extraordinary works included surreal self-portraits, room-sized installations, full-length novels and fantastical costume designs.
Many know her as a surrealist artist, or as the wife of the more-famous German painter Max Ernst - but the Tate’s exhibition plans to reveal how she pushed the boundaries of surrealism and created seven decades of sensual, uncanny works.
If you want to make some time for Tanning, here are the things you need to know - and the works you have to see.
She was more than a surrealist
Dorothea Tanning’s artistic legacy has become permanently wedded with the surrealist movement, a mostly male group of early 20th century avant-garde artists who were interested in the subconscious. But in reality her oeuvre was far more expansive. Tanning was an entirely self-taught artist (unless you count three brief weeks at Chicago art college in 1930) who was already making money as a commercial artist before she got to know the surrealists, and her seven-decade career is notable for being relentlessly experimental as well as prolific.
She was interested in depicting girlhood and womanhood
The surrealists are often accused of making women into objects, but in Tanning’s most famous works women discover their own power. In Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, two young girls face an invisible wind as they stand before a giant sunflower and a glowing open door, whilst in her self-portrait Birthday Tanning looks past our gaze, bare-chested wearing a skirt of green branches. A winged creature stands before her. Her works are set in eerie, dark worlds, but the women within them are always daring and unwavering.
But don’t call her a woman artist
Tanning didn’t hold much truck with the term. She once said, “There is no such thing - or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist’.”
Her famous Birthday painting introduced her to Max Ernst
German painter Max Ernst came to Tanning’s studio in 1942 to consider her work for an exhibition of emerging female artists. He was captivated by Birthday self-portrait - and was in fact the person to give it that name. Famously the pair had a game of chess, and were inseparable from that time on. They married in 1946 as part of a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, and remained together until Ernst’s death in 1976.
Her later works are larger than life
By the Sixties Tanning was playing with materials to create new kinds of work. Her fabric sculptures expand the form of nudes to soft, life-like figures, even with their own indented spines. In the early Seventies she created Chambre 202, where bodies seem to grow out of the walls of an imaginary hotel room.
She was also a poet and novelist
The final years of Tanning’s career were taken over by a passion for poetry, and she had works published in iconic publications such as the New Yorker and Paris Review. One of her unpublished poems, Stain, expresses frustration at how her marriage to Ernst defined her career but not his. She published her first novel, Chasm, in 2004 when she was 94 years old; it will be republished this year to coincide with the Tate’s exhibition.
Five Dorothea Tanning works you need to know
Birthday, 1942
Tanning’s ethereal 1942 self-portrait shows the artist, bare-chested, before a series of doors, standing next to a dark winged creature. The painting captivated Max Ernst immediately, who went on to marry her, and there’s something other-worldly about it. She was nonplussed by her own physique though, stating in a 2002 interview: “My breasts didn’t amount to much. Quite unremarkable.”
Hotel du Pavot, Chambre 202, 1970-73
Figures climb up the walls and grow out of chairs in this room-sized installation, created during 1970-73. It takes Tanning’s soft sculptures and transfers them to an imaginary hotel room, something she saw as a three-dimensional way of expressing the ideas in her paintings.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943
This 1943 work, which is part of the Tate’s collection, shows two young girls locked in dream-like states. One appears to be blissed out, the other battling a demon. Tanning herself said that the painting was about unknown forces emerging at night-time: “At night one imagines all sorts of happenings in the shadows of the darkness.”
Family Portrait, 1954
Tanning is at her most overtly feminist in this portrait of a family where each person is portrayed according to how much power they hold. A cook is almost as big as the dog, while a woman stares blankly as she is overshadowed by a large man in a suit.
Chiens de Cythere, 1963
In the Sixties, Tanning moved toward a more abstract style of painting. This 1963 work reflects this change in style, but look closely and you will see small figures appear. Tanning describing creating these works as “like a game”, where she would hide and reveal images.
Dorothea Tanning runs at Tate Modern from February 27 to June 9; tate.org.uk
