Dorothea Tanning

A concise introduction to the later work of the self-taught American Surrealist artist and author American Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) worked across painting, sculpture, printmaking, installation and writing over the course of seven decades, producing one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic oeuvres. Tanning’s work conjures dreamlike worlds that straddle the hazy border between figuration and abstraction, pioneering a unique prismatic formal language that resonates keenly today. This fully illustrated catalog highlights Tanning’s works created between the 1950s and ’90s, a particularly fruitful period in the artist’s career, and traces her stylistic arc through over 20 significant paintings drawn from interrelated phases of the artist’s practice. Scholars Mary Ann Caws, Victoria Carruthers and Kate Conley contribute essays to the volume; additionally, it reproduces Tanning’s 1986 essay “To Paint,” a poetic and impassioned manifesto on painting and Surrealism. The catalog takes its title from the last line of this text.

'Tanning's fictional debut unquestionably deserves to be recognised as a complete artistic success . . . Tanning has assembled all the ingredients necessary for an extraordinary drama of love and betrayal, jealousy and regret . . . told in confident, fluid prose highlighted by passages of hallucinatory beauty' GuardianIn the stark beauty of the desert, a mansion built by a madman rears its impudent architecture like an insult.The estate is called Windcote, 'its very name a masquerade', and its master, the odious Raoul Meridian, has invited a group of guests to spend a weekend, during the course of which they will find themselves driven by obsessions and confusions unlike any they've experienced before. Untouched by the fevers and failures around her is the indomitable child Destina, who will lead them into the heart of a mysterious canyon, where desire and cruelty forge an implacable truth.'It seems hardly fair that Dorothea Tanning, in a long, passionately inventive career as a painter, should have acquired as well the other harmony of prose, and that her passionate inventions as a writer should be so lovingly, so wisely resolved' Richard Howard

Renowned painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning imagines and realises a collage of surreal wit, formal inventiveness, and urban and whimsical visuals. Oh, we were primed like canvas', she writes in one poem, and every page in this remarkable debut becomes a unique experience to gaze and wonder with this artisit's imaginitive, roving eye. We are made to see more clearly, more forcefully the city landscape, the creative impulse, and the words of potential disaster and sensual erotics with a vision that survives taste, trend and time.'

The life and times of one of our most enchanting artists; a twentieth-century fairy tale, lovingly remembered and luminously told.Fourteen years ago, the artist Dorothea Tanning published Birthday, a collection of reminiscences. Now she has expanded it into a memoir of her journey through the last century as confidant, collaborator, and muse to some of its most inspired minds and personalities: a diverse assemblage that ranges from the fathers of dada and surrealism to Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, Joan Miró, James Merrill, and many more. At its center is the relationship, tenderly rendered, between Tanning and her famed husband, the enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst.Whether recalling the poignant presence of her friend Joseph Cornell or simply marveling at the facades along a Venice canal, "their filmy reflections fluttering in the dirty canal like fragile altar cloths hung out to dry," Tanning's writing is beguiling, wry, and shot through with the same eye for pregnant detail and immanent magic that marks her art.

Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), one of the twentieth-century’s most original and provocative painters, delivers a vivid account of a fascinating life lived as an artist among artists, revealing the irresistibly creative mind that propelled her. She travelled the world of Surrealism and went beyond it with fellow explorers, including Max Ernst, to whom she was married. Their life together forms an important part of her story; a story which, spanning almost a century, unfolds through Tanning’s incandescent prose.