If you could change anything in your life, or lives, what would it be?
More color in my dreams.
― Dorothea Tanning in an interview for Salon, in 2002
Convolotus alchemelia (Quiet-willow window), 1998 by Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning in her studio, Sedona, Arizona, 1946
Photograph by Lee Miller
Maternity. 1946
You have been friends with so many important cultural figures. May I ask you to play a little pseudo-surrealist free-association game? How about your husband Max Ernst?
His humor. Ironic, amused, bemused. We laughed a lot. Even today, I have to keep from finding things absurd, which mostly they are. At the same time I’m crying my eyes out.
How about André Breton, founder of surrealism and dadaism?
Severely: “Dorothea, do you wear that low neckline just to provoke men?”
René Magritte?
Sweet.
Truman Capote?
A neat little package — of dynamite.
Orson Wells?
Scowler.
Joseph Cornell?
The courtly love of the 13th century troubadours.
Dylan Thomas?
How could anyone resist his bardic exuberance, his dithyrambs?
Duchamp?
Peerless.
Picasso?
One time when I was at his house, Jhuan-les-pins, for an afternoon visit, we stood at the kitchen door yard for farewells and he broke off the last flower from an old rose bush and handed it to me. How would you feel?
― Dorothea Tanning in an interview for Salon, in 2002
Read the whole interview http://www.salon.com/2002/02/11/tanning/
Max in the blue boat by Dorothea Tanning
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Dorothea Tanning, 1943
It’s about confrontation. Everyone believes he/she is his/her drama. While they don’t always have giant sunflowers (most aggressive of flowers) to contend with, there are always stairways, hallways, even very private theatres where the suffocations and the finalities are being played out, the blood red carpet or cruel yellows, the attacker, the delighted victim …
― Dorothea Tanning in a letter
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was made while Tanning was staying with her companion, the artist Max Ernst, in Sedona, Arizona. It was their first trip to this area in which they would later live for several years. In her memoir, Birthday, Tanning recalls how Mozart was a favourite topic of conversation at that time, and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is titled after one of one of his most well-known serenades (Birthday, p.85). By the door of the ranch Tanning planted some sunflower seeds and she became fascinated with these plants. She told the author that she saw the sunflower in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik as ‘a symbol of all the things that youth has to face and to deal with,’ and has said that it represented the ‘never-ending battle we wage with unknown forces, the forces that were there before our civilisation’. The apparent intervention of unexplained or supernatural forces in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik recalls characteristics of the Gothic novels that Tanning read in her youth, and which were admired by many of the artists and writers of the surrealist group with whom she associated in the 1940s and beyond.
Read more http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tanning-eine-kleine-nachtmusik-t07346/text-summary
photo © DACS, 2002
If you get married you’re branded. We could have gone on, Max and I, all our lives without the tag. I never heard him use the word “wife” in regard to me. He was very sorry about that wife thing. I’m very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a tossup who gets pregnant, the man or woman. Boy, that would end rape for one thing. And “woman artist”? Disgusting.
― Dorothea Tanning in an interview for Salon, in 2002
Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Sedona, Arizona, 1948
Photograph by Bob Towers
Read the whole interview http://www.salon.com/2002/02/11/tanning/
Man Ray thought it was funny. With the intention to marry, we had come to Hollywood, where he lived. Getting married in Hollywood! We all laughed about it, but the next morning he said, “Maybe we’ll go too. If Max can do it so can I.” And added, ruefully, “Though I’ve never done anything so rectangular.”
On October 24, 1946, therefore, a double wedding in Beverly Hills united, in the eyes of the law, Max and Dorothea, and Man and Julie. There. It’s said and done. Painless, forgettable, but fun.
― Dorothea Tanning - from Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001, p. 139.
Man Ray, Juliet Browner, Max Ernst & Dorothea Tanning 1946
Well, excuse me for this, but “Birthday” is among other dreamlike things, a topless self-portrait. Is it fair to say that at that time, 1942, people thought you were immodest?
Well, I was aware it was pretty daring, but that’s not why I did it. It was a kind of a statement, wanting the utter truth, and bareness was necessary. My breasts didn’t amount to much. Quite unremarkable. And besides, when you are feeling very solemn and painting very intensively, you think only of what you are trying to communicate.
So what have you tried to communicate as an artist? What were your goals, and have you achieved them?
I’d be satisfied with having suggested that there is more than meets the eye.
― Dorothea Tanning in an interview for Salon, in 2002
Birthday by Dorothea Tanning, 1942
Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don’t see a different purpose for it now. ― Dorothea Tanning
She would have celebrated her 102nd birthday today, if she hadn’t passed away this year in January - Dorothea Tanning was until very recently the oldest living surrealist.
She discovered Dada and Surrealism in 1936, after visiting Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition in Museum of Modern Art in New York, soon starting with her own surreal paintings. In 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio and the twoplayed chess and fell in love as she said - four years later they were married in a double ceremony with their friend Man Ray and his wife. They moved to France in 1949 where they lived until Max Ernst died in 1976, when she moved back to USA. Towards the end of her life she focused more on her writing, producing two books of memoirs Birthday (named after one of her most famous paintings) and the expanded version Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. About contemporary art she said wisely - 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.
See much more about Dorothea here http://www.dorotheatanning.org/index.php
And read aricles
here http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/06/dorothea-tanning
and here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/9060213/Dorothea-Tanning.html
