Dorothea Tanning facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Dorothea Tanning
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Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in 1948. Photo by Robert Bruce Inverarity in the Smithsonian Institution collection.
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| Born |
Dorothea Margaret Tanning
25 August 1910 Galesburg, Illinois, U.S.
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| Died | 31 January 2012 (aged 101) New York City, U.S.
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| Known for | Painting, sculpture, printmaking, writing |
| Movement | Surrealism |
| Spouse(s) |
Homer Shannon
(m. 1941, divorced) |
Dorothea Margaret Tanning (born August 25, 1910 – died January 31, 2012) was an American artist. She was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Her early art was inspired by a style called Surrealism.
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About Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning grew up in Galesburg, Illinois. She was one of three daughters. After high school, she worked at a library and went to Knox College for two years. She then decided to become an artist.
In 1930, she moved to Chicago, and in 1935, she moved to New York. There, she worked as a commercial artist to support herself while she painted. In 1941, she was briefly married to a writer named Homer Shannon.
In New York, Dorothea discovered Surrealism at a big art show in 1936. This art style really interested her. In 1941, an art director at Macy's department store was impressed by her work. He introduced her to a gallery owner named Julien Levy. Levy quickly decided to show her art.
Levy also introduced her to other Surrealist artists who had moved to New York. One of them was the German painter Max Ernst.
Dorothea first met Max Ernst at a party in 1942. Later, he visited her studio to see her art for an exhibition. He really liked her self-portrait called Birthday (1942). Dorothea and Max fell in love and spent their lives together. They lived in New York, then in Sedona, and later in France. They got married in 1946 in Hollywood. They were married for 30 years.
In 1949, Dorothea and Max moved to France. They lived in Paris and later in Provence. Max Ernst passed away in 1976. After his death, Dorothea moved back to New York. She continued to create art in the 1980s. In the 1990s and 2000s, she focused on her writing and poetry. She kept working and publishing until she passed away on January 31, 2012, at the age of 101.
In 1997, the Dorothea Tanning Foundation was started. Its goal is to keep her art, writing, and poetry known and understood by more people.
Dorothea Tanning's Art Journey
Dorothea Tanning was mostly a self-taught artist. This means she learned art on her own, except for three weeks she spent at an art school in 1930. Her early paintings from the 1940s had dream-like images. She was friends with many Surrealist artists and writers. This led many people to see her as a Surrealist painter. However, she developed her own unique style over her six-decade career.
Her early paintings, like Birthday and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943), showed detailed, dream-like scenes. Dorothea loved reading Gothic and Romantic novels from her local library. These stories, full of imagination, greatly influenced her art. Like other Surrealist painters, she was very careful with details and used soft brushstrokes. During this time, she became good friends with artists like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. She also designed costumes for ballets by George Balanchine. She even appeared in two experimental films by Hans Richter.
Over the next ten years, Dorothea's painting style changed. Her art became less obvious and more suggestive. She started moving away from pure Surrealism. By the mid-1950s, her work became more broken up and colorful. An example is Insomnias (1957). She explained it by saying, "Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered... I broke the mirror, you might say."
By the late 1960s, her paintings were almost completely abstract. But they still hinted at the shape of the female body. From 1969 to 1973, Dorothea explored "soft sculpture." These were three-dimensional artworks made from fabric. Five of these sculptures are part of an art display called Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970–73). This is now in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. While in France, Dorothea also became a skilled printmaker. She created art for special books by poets. After her husband's death in 1976, she focused on painting again. By 1980, she moved back to New York. There, she had a very creative period, making paintings, drawings, collages, and prints.
Dorothea Tanning's art has been shown in many exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Major shows were held in Paris in 1974 and in Sweden and London in 1993. The New York Public Library showed her prints in 1992. The Philadelphia Museum of Art had a small show in 2000 to celebrate getting her famous 1942 self-portrait, Birthday. In 2018, a big exhibition of her work was held in Madrid, which then traveled to the Tate Modern in London in 2019.
Dorothea Tanning's Writing Career
Dorothea Tanning wrote stories and poems throughout her life. Her first short story was published in 1943. She also wrote poems to go with her art in special books. But she really started focusing on writing after she returned to New York in the 1980s.
In 1986, she published her first memoir, called Birthday. A memoir is a book about a person's own life. This book was named after her famous painting. It has been translated into four other languages. In 2001, she wrote a longer version of her memoir called Between Lives: An Artist and Her World.
With encouragement from her friend and mentor James Merrill, Dorothea began writing her own poetry in her eighties. Her poems were published regularly in well-known magazines like The Yale Review and The New Yorker. A collection of her poems, A Table of Content, and a short novel, Chasm: A Weekend, were both published in 2004. Her second poetry collection, Coming to That, came out in 2011.
In 1994, Dorothea Tanning started the Wallace Stevens Award. This is a big annual prize given to a poet who shows great skill in poetry.
Dorothea Tanning's Thoughts on Art
In a 2002 interview, Dorothea Tanning was asked what she tried to show as an artist. She replied: "I’d be satisfied with having suggested that there is more than meets the eye."
When asked about art being made today, she said: "I get the impression that the idea is to shock. So many people laboring to outdo Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t even shocking anymore, just kind of sad."
Speaking about her relationship with Max Ernst, she shared: "I was a loner, am a loner, good Lord, it's the only way I can imagine working. And then when I hooked up with Max Ernst, he was clearly the only person I needed and, I assure you, we never, never talked art. Never."
She also said about being called a Surrealist: "If it wasn’t known that I had been a Surrealist, I don’t think it would be evident in what I’m doing now. But I’m branded as a Surrealist. Tant pis." (This means "Too bad" in French.)
And a famous quote from her: "Women artists. There is no such thing—or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as 'man artist' or 'elephant artist'. You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you."
She also believed: "Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity."
Where to See Her Art
Dorothea Tanning's art can be found in many public collections around the world, including:
- Centre Georges Pompidou / Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
- Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- The Menil Collection, Houston
- Moderna Museet, Stockholm
- Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
- Philadelphia Museum of Art
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
- Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
- Tate Modern, London
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
See also
In Spanish: Dorothea Tanning para niños
- List of centenarians (artists)
- Visionary art
- Magic realism
- Women Surrealists
