Dorothea Tanning valuation
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.
What a work by Dorothea Tanning is worth
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Bio
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.
The retrospective, Chambre 202 and the prints
The first large exhibition of her work in twenty-five years opened at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2018 and came to Tate Modern from February to June 2019, with about a hundred works. Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202, the room installation of 1970 to 1973 in which soft figures burst out of the walls of a hotel room, is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou.
Her prints and illustrated books are catalogued in Hail, Delirium!, compiled by Roberta Waddell and published in 1992, covering 1942 to 1991. The Dorothea Tanning Foundation, working with the Destina Foundation, is compiling a catalogue raisonné of the rest of the work, and a record there is the reference an owner should look for.
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