Dorothea Tanning Obituary

Dorothea Tanning 1910 – 2012,was the Last Old-School Surrealist and the Oldest Emerging Poet

Artist and poet Dorothea Tanning has died at the marvellous age of one-hundred and one. She discovered the route into her own creativity via an exhibition of Surrealist art. In 1936 she had just moved to New York, with an ambition to be a successful painter, but was forced to earn her living as a waitress and catalogue designer. She was only vaguely aware of Surrealism before she visited Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, Alfred Barr’s momentous show at the new Museum of Modern Art. The work that the 26 year old painter saw there was a revelation to her, for the first time she found something matching her own visions. She had drawn and painted from a very young age and as a child created a surrealist image without any prior knowledge, when she painted a nude with leaves for hair, to the horror of her Lutheran parents. Whether they were more horrified by the leaves or the nudity is not entirely clear.

Dorothea’s parents were Swedish immigrants, living in the rural county of Galesburg, Illinois. The family called her Dottie. Despite their religious outlook, her mother encouraged theatricality in her three daughters and her father took them to see cowboy movies. Dorothea yearned after actor Lord Churlton, the villain of the Westerns, rather than the hero, Tom Mix. She said later, “I have been very perverse over a very long period and I don’t suppose I’ll be anything else”.  As a teenager her perversity also took the form of an ambition to live in Paris and be an artist. Her early career was deliberately conceived as a step by step journey towards this end, though she would not actually live and work in Paris until she was forty years old.

In 1932 Dorothea left home and to her parents dismay moved to Chicago, where she began a Bohemian existence, having very briefly attended as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. She abandoned her studies after only three weeks. She found the regime too restrictive and spent some time exploring the Institute’s art collection. She evolved a flawless technique as a painter with little tuition and she certainly felt no need to be taught what to paint. Her skilfully executed works have always personified her own ideas, proving how correct she was to have faith in her own talent and reject formal tutoring. To earn her keep, she began work as a commercial artist.

After a few years in Chicago, Dorothea made the deliberate decision in 1936 to move towards her Parisian goal. New York was the next step on the journey. She boarded a bus and arrived in time for her revelatory experience at the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition. In August 1939, she travelled on to Paris determined to meet the Surrealists. It is not clear whether she was aware of the political situation in Europe and travelled anyway, as a blasé tourist, or she really was ignorant. Either way her timing was atrocious, because war or no war, in August most Parisians goes away en vacances. She arrived with letters of introduction to Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and Picasso, but nobody was home. She returned to New York, via relations in Stockholm, her mission unfulfilled.

She lived in New York from 1936 to 1948, momentous years which transformed young Dottie from Galesberg into Dorothea Tanning, a perceptive and talented artist who counted the greatest exponents of the avant-garde as her friends and admirers. In 1941 she was making advertising illustrations for Macy’s store and painting at home in her apartment, which she shared with abstract painter Ronnie Elliot, and together they read works of philosophy and attended classes in Hindu dance. She founded lasting friendships with a number of other creative people included Xenia and John Cage, Buffie Johnson, Kay Sage, Muriel Streeter, Julien Levy, Yves Tanguy, Sonja Sekula, Roberto Matta, Maya Deren, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp and Gypsy Rose Lee.

 As the list of her friendships illustrates, soon after returning home from her ill-timed 1939 Paris trip to seek out the Surrealists, Dorothea Tanning found they were coming to her when the retreat of avant-garde artists from Nazi fascism began. There is no doubt certain Surrealists, notably Max Ernst, were delighted to meet such an attractive woman artist, though Ernst had always preferred very young women and Dorothea was no ingénue. The opinion of Andre Breton, Surrealism’s godfather, was less favourable once Max fell for Dorothea. Breton never welcomed any woman who threatened his influence over his stable of surrealists (he never counted the women as members of the central group). However even for Breton there was no denying the strength of Tanning’s surrealist paintings.

Julien Levy’s New York gallery had championed the Surrealists from 1932 and Levy was very enthusiastic about women artists. There is a certain amount of mis-information about Dorothea Tanning’s exhibitions, some claim that she had none in the USA until the 1980’s. In fact she first exhibited her work in New Orleans in 1934, before ever seeing Surrealist art and in 1944, a year after participating in the Exhibition of 31 Women at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, she had her first solo show at Levy’s Gallery. Levy also gave her a second exhibition in 1948 and this was followed by seven more solo shows in the USA before 1980, as well as numerous group exhibitions.

In 1942 it was Levy who introduced Dorothea to the ex-pat Surrealists, at a party in May that year. This was actually where she first met Max Ernst, though Peggy Guggenheim (who at the time was Ernst’s wife) claims they only met when Ernst was appointed as scout for the 1943 Exhibition of 31 Women, at her gallery. Ernst chose Birthday, a painting harking back to Dorothea’s childhood image of a leafy nude, with its full-length self portrait with bare-breasts and a tree-like skirt, whilst also revealing her current surrealist inspired enthusiasm for doorways, leading into mysterious spaces. This interest in the complexities of space continued into the 1960’s. Birthday is now her best known image and has become an icon of high Surrealism; the painting is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Dorothea Tanning married Max Ernst in Oct 1946, in Beverly Hills. This was Ernst’s fourth and final marriage, he had also had relationships with several other artists including Valentine Hugo, Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington, but it was Tanning who kept him, for 35 years. Until 1950 they lived occasionally in New York, but mostly in Sedona, Arizona, where they built a simple wood-framed house in the rocky landscape, away from civilisation. They had few conveniences and it was a day of celebration when their house was connected to a newly sunk well.

This sojourn in the desert had a profound long-term effect on Dorothea’s work, though at first her paintings retained their urban surrealism with semi-Gothic interiors and strange, self-obsessed figures. Gradually, like Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico, Tanning found that her perceptions were permanently changed by desert living, as the hallucinatory qualities of the Arizona light bled into her artistic vision. Her figures became obscured by moving draperies, before finally giving way to wildly coloured and illuminated fragments of space, inhabited by half recognised images slipping between dimensions, in a sequence of paintings she called Insomnias. She conceived this change into fragmented abstraction herself, without reference to other artists or movements, even Ernst had no real influence. The title, Insomnias, points to a conscious rejection of the Surrealist dream, Tanning abandoned the old surrealism somewhere amongst the desert rocks.

Early in the 1950’s, Dorothea Tanning realised her youthful ambition and became a working artist in Paris. Her introduction to Parisian life was a freezing winter in an elegant, borrowed apartment with high ceilings and expensive draperies, but no heating. Soon they rejected Parisian life for the tranquillity of the French campagne. Whilst in France, Dorothea’s circle of friends widened to include painters Leonor Fini, Jean Miro, Oscar Dominguez, sculptor Giacometti and writer James Baldwin. Unlike many Americans living in France, Tanning immersed herself in French culture, learning to speak and read the language. In May 1954 she had her first Paris exhibition and found she was not so much under the cloud of her famous husband as she had been in the USA. Her show was a success, her work sold and not only to her friends.

Whilst she was almost forgotten in her homeland, between 1952 and 1980 Tanning participated in exhibitions in France, London, Brussels, Milan, Turin, Geneva, Vienna, Cologne, Berlin and Stockholm. At least 18 were one-woman exhibitions, which shows how women artists were being taken more seriously in Europe than in the USA, where surrealism was no longer in vogue and the macho ethos of the abstract expressionists had swept aside most thoughts of Europe. In France, Tanning’s art was regarded as on a par with the older surrealists, though her newer work moved miles from the formal representation of surreal dreams where she had begun. Her refined technique remained, while her vision turned inward to intense, light suffused inner landscapes, where partly recognised forms appear and submerge through multiple distortions of the picture plane. Using the intense colours of Arizona, these large works show her escape, no longer a quirky surrealist but a mature artist who had outgrown the confines of surrealism.

In the 1960’s she conceived a group of sculptures which became the installation Hotel du Pavot, Chambre 202, consisting of organic forms stitched in tweed which morph nightmarishly into furniture, wall and fireplace. This work is now in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, other smaller pieces are in Tate Modern, London and in the USA. These sculptures have become as popular as her paintings and are another impressively personal extension of her creativity. Dorothea Tanning’s work remained her own, she was neither a collaborator with nor a pupil of any other artist, though some have tried to read the influence of other surrealists, especially Matta and Ernst, in her work.

She felt settled in France, the land which accepted her as an artist in her own right, not merely Max Ernst’s pretty wife - who paints. In 1967 she fearlessly undertook the major project of designing and building her own house in Seillans, Provence, with spacious studios for herself and her husband. This house was her home until Ernst’s death in 1976. Tanning was devastated and suffered an artistic hiatus lasting several years. She admitted in 2004 that in spite of her air of independence during her marriage, she had felt the affliction shared by many an artist married to a ‘great man’.

Dorothea travelled, visiting Senegal, Morocco, Italy, before returning to Paris, but still couldn’t come to grips with her work. A 1978 painting, Still in the Studio depicts her inertia, with a misshapen and unfocussed nude slumped on a table of painting equipment, whilst the view of Parisian rooftops out of the window is in sharp focus. In 1979 she shipped herself back to New York where, finally she felt able to concentrate properly on her work. She became interested in printmaking, producing many etchings and lithographs as well as paintings and collage. Her later prints are far more individual than earlier standard surrealist fare. She also made new friends, including poets Richard Howard and James Merrill, who encouraged her to write.

Dorothea Tanning’s final group of paintings were created in 1997 & 1998 when the artist was in her late eighties. These depicted huge, lush flower forms, though no botanist could name the species, they were further creations of Tanning’s endlessly fertile imagination. Frailty stopped her painting afterwards, but she had already begun her final career with the publication of the first volume of her memoirs. Subsequently she published a novel and two volumes of poetry, becoming a published poet at the age of 89. Her highly crafted and thoroughly modern poems were greeted very favourably by critics. Her updated memoir, Between Lives, 2001, tells the love story of her and Max Ernst, but is also a book saturated with startling imagery, humour and insight into her own complex life and art.

In 2004 Dorothea said, in an interview for the New Yorker, that she should not be described as the oldest living surrealist, because she moved on to something “less obvious – more contemplative and reflective and experimental, fifty years ago”. In her later days she preferred to be described as the oldest living, emerging poet.

In August 2010 Dorothea Tanning celebrated her 100^th birthday while still living quietly in her apartment in Lower Manhattan. She died on the thirtieth of January 2012 and, though she had moved on, she will inevitably be remembered as the last of the old school surrealists.

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