A painter moves past the mirrors of Surrealism to invent flowers all her own.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) Dorothea Tanning Photo: Tate Gallery Several months ago we came upon this work—”Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” (“A Little Night Music”), from 1943 by Dorothea Tanning. Who wants to venture in–presuming to explain these tense, swooning girls, or the broken sunflower at the top of the stairs? We are, thank you, very much more comfortable hovering at a bit of a distance, above and outside wooden railing. (Note how DT has not just permitted but encouraged that perspective.)
The Mirror (1950)
Dorothea Tanning
We were even more impressed by this lesser known painting “The Mirror” (1950.) As Human Flower Projects go, this one manages a sublime, nightmarish comedy minus the screeching and dismemberment typical of 21st century art. Where have you gone, Dorothea Tanning? A nation turns its bloodshot eyes to you….
Tanning turns 98 today (August 25, 2008). Not everyone would have attempted a career change at age 89. But she did it, or perhaps we should say—is doing it. After 60 years of painting and sculpting and set designing in the shadows of Surrealism’s Big Boys (she was married to Max Ernst), Tanning has turned to poetry. Here’s one of her recent works.
Before letting go her brushes, though, she completed twelve large paintings, Another Language of Flowers. Unlike her surrealist roses and sunflowers with their eerie suggestions, these are wholly imaginary blooms, huge, and—what a shock!—gentle. They were exhibited at the Boston University Art Gallery in 1999, then reproduced in a book alongside poems by many of her admirers, including James Merrill , Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery.
It appears that DT, steeped in Surrealism, found another language, then another medium. It’s never too late. We wish her happy birthday. Thanks for giving us middle-aged pikers something better than hope: proof.
(Originally published: HFP August 25, 2008)
Dorothea Tanning with Quiet Willow-Walk
Photo: Steve Moss
Update: Dorothea Tanning lived to be 101, dying in New York City January 3, 2012. Her development through the heady (literally) years of Surrealism into ever greater abstraction, then sculpture, installations, and poetry comes blazing through in this intriguing and thoroughgoing website of The Dorothea Tanning Foundation.
Never have we seen such an intriguing yet lucid account of an artist’s career, a chronological presentation of her art works (interspersed with photographic portraits), each linked to related commentaries or interviews. There are announcements of recent exhibitions and publications, of course, and a solicitation, too: the curators ask readers for information about some of Tanning’s more — how about most ? — mysterious works. There’s always more to know.
The sunflowers that caught our attention in “A Little Night Music” and “The Mirror” reappear in a few other works through the early ’50s and then vanish. By 1974, we can sense that Tanning has already broken out of the symbolic handcuffs of Surrealism to find her own way.
Asclepius formidabilis: Griefbane (1997)
Dorothea Tanning
from Another Language of Flowers
“I’ve been trying for a long time to deal with the figures that emerge on the canvas,” she told Alain Jouffroy. “Time is needed to know them. In the first years, I was painting our side of the mirror—the mirror for me is a door—but I think that I’ve gone over, to a place where one no longer faces identities at all. One looks at them somewhat obliquely, slyly. To capture the moment, to accept it with all its complex identities.”
And such complex identities demanded wholesale invention.
Collaborating with twelve poets, Tanning produced a dozen new species, among them:
Pictor mysteriosa (a.k.a Burnt Umbrage)
Asclepius formidabilis (a.k.a. Griefbane)
Nephaster cyaneus (a.k.a. Cloudstar) …
Convolotus alchemelia (a.k.a. Quiet-willow window)
“They are naked, precise depictions of visions,” Tanning said, “as real to me as botanical specimens are to the scientist”.
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