"Art has always been the raft we climb onto to save our mental health. I see no other purpose for it today."
American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning trained at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. She moved to New York in 1938 and became involved in Surrealism before marrying Max Ernst in 1946. She associated with the group of Surrealists in exile, centered around André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, and was exhibited by gallery owners Julien Levy (1944, 1948) and Alexander Iolas (1953). She was already featured in the pioneering Exhibition by 31 Women, organized in 1943 by Peggy Guggenheim. Tanning established herself on the New York art scene as a leading figure of post-war American female expression.
Sexual fantasies, anxieties, and fears rooted in childhood and adolescence form the basis of the visual hallucinations the artist sought to depict on her canvases. She broke millennia-old painting conventions by choosing to represent desire from a female perspective. She declared that she was "breaking the mirror" by rejecting the roles of muse or wife typically assigned to women around the Surrealists. Tanning painted fabrics floating around female chimeras, who alternately seek refuge in them or reveal themselves nude on the canvas in a frantic dance.
Dorothea Tanning offers us living paintings that, over the years, become increasingly enigmatic and mysterious. Between eroticism and esotericism, the artist tells the story of her intimacy. Her work was praised by critics, and in the following decades, major contemporary art institutions devoted retrospectives to her (including the Centre Pompidou and the Philadelphia Museum of Art). After Ernst’s death in 1976, Tanning returned to New York, where she lived until her passing on January 31, 2012. In 2019, she was exhibited at the Tate Modern in London.
