Dorothea Tanning
Surrealist of endless hotel corridors and doors, who later sewed her figures out of tweed.
Dorothea Tanning was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1910, saw the Museum of Modern Art's Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition in 1936 and recognised her subject at once. Birthday, the 1942 self-portrait with bare breasts and a receding series of open doors, brought Max Ernst to her studio; they married and lived together until his death in 1976. The 1940s paintings are precise and hallucinatory — girls in corridors, hair standing on end, sunflowers on staircases. From the 1960s she made soft sculptures sewn from tweed and wool, which are the strangest and now the most sought part of the work. She died in 2012, aged a hundred and one.
The market has risen substantially with the reassessment of the women of Surrealism. The 1940s paintings lead. The soft sculptures and the Chambre 202 room installation are textile objects and present real conservation issues — wool, tweed and stuffing distort, attract pests and cannot be cleaned. Tanning also wrote poetry and memoir, made prints and illustrated books, and produced a large body of drawings. The Destina Foundation, which she established, holds the archive.
If you own a work by Dorothea Tanning
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