The Metamorphosis of Dorothea Tanning: On the Painting Insomnias
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 79; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00233600903494561
ISSN1651-2294
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See e.g. Paul Cézanne's paintings of the Mont St Victoire and many early works by Henri Matisse, in which the colours used do not correspond with reality and the same colours are used in different sections of the painting: a practice which had not – traditionally – occurred in painting previously. 2. In the foreground, a nude woman is bent backwards, exposing her throat, by a man who stabs her. Others, too, have identified this connection; Alain Jouffroy, for example, writes: »La seule et très lointaine ressemblance que ce tableau entretienne avec un autre, la femme renversée l'établit avec celle que l'on poignarde au premier plan, dans la Mort de Sardanapale, et dont le corps comme un arc bandé vers le lit du prince assyrien. Mais Dorothea Tanning a ceci de particulier qu'elle ne théâtralise jamais la convulsion des corps. Elle les fait surgir des anfractuosités du paysage, et les montre comme des éléments mêmes de l'atmosphère, – des concentrations de force et d'énergie naturelles.« Alain Jouffroy, »L'attentat de Dorothea Tanning«, Dorothea Tanning, Paris 1977, numéro spécial de XXe siècle, p. 25. See also Lasse Söderberg, På andra sidan dörren. Om Dorothea Tannings måleri, Lund, 1993, p. 25f, although he also maintains that the woman in Johann Heinrich Füssli's painting The Nightmare (1781) is a more important prototype for the artist. 3. The eyes are very light; they seem to peer and are slightly threatening. Their lightness recalls the eyes of Max Ernst, whose ice-blue colour Tanning picked up in other works, such as her painting Max in a Blue Boat, 1947. 4. See e.g. Ursel Bruy: »Die alchemistische Emanzipation – Transformationsstrategien bei Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini und Dorothea Tanning«, in Metamorphosen der Liebe. Kunstwissenschaftliche Studien zu Eros und Geschlecht im Surrealismus, ed.Verena Krieger, Ikonologie der Moderne Band 1, Hamburg, 2006, pp. 103–121; Angela Lampe: »Größter Schatten oder größtes Licht. Surrealistische Frauenentwürfe zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit«, in Die unheimliche Frau. Weiblichkeit im Surrealismus, exh. cat., ed. Angela Lampe, Bielefeld, 2001, pp. 25–48; Jürgen Pech: »Hinter den Türen des Werkes von Dorothea Tanning«, in: Mythen – Symbole – Metamorphosen in der Kunst seit 1800. Festschrift für Christa Lichtenstern zum 60. Geburtstag, eds Helga and J. Adolf Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth and Regina Maria Hillert, Berlin, 2004, pp. 366–377. The most comprehensive overview is Jean Christophe Bailly's Dorothea Tanning, New York, 1995. 5. See e.g. Bruy, 2006. Whitney Chadwick discusses the women's self-portraits and writes about the close connections between Tanning, Kay Sage, Kahlo and Fini. See Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, London, 2002 (1985), p. 92ff. See also Renée Riese Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership, Lincoln and London, 1994. The couple Ernst and Tanning are considered in the introductory chapter, see primarily p. 19ff. 6. Nor do these paintings conform with the movements primarily highlighted by art historians, such as Minimalism during the 1960s, Postmodernism and Neo-Expressionism in the following decades. 7. In John Russell's view, Tanning wants to be judged as an artist on the basis of works dating from 1942 onwards. He writes: »The earliest paintings by which Dorothea Tanning now cares to be judged are dated 1942, and they have the kind of assured professionalism which is not picked up from one day to the next.« John Russell, »The Several Selves of Dorothea Tanning« (1977),in Dorothea Tanning, eds Sune Nordgren and others, Malmö, 1993, p. 15. Tanning's memoirs are contradictory. While she writes that Birthday and another painting led to Julien Levy wanting to exhibit her (p. 57), she also says, »At first there was only one picture, a self-portrait«, p. 62. Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and her World, Evanston, 2004 (2001). Chadwick provides a more balanced view of the whole matter, pointing out that it was the second or third painting she created according to the tenets of Surrealism. See Chadwick, 2002, p. 92. 8. Tanning previously worked inter alia as an illustrator, and it was thanks to an editor at Macy's that she was put in touch with the gallery-owner Julien Levy. See the chronology in Dorothea Tanning, 1993, p. 114. 9. Söderberg, 1993, p. 15 and p. 16. Söderberg is well aware that Tanning's aim is get us to consider Birthday her first work; he nevertheless accedes to her demands and deals with her oeuvre in exactly these terms. His choice of words in relation to this painting actually serves to support the myth. 10. See Dorothea Tanning, 1993, p. 114. 11. See e.g. the paintings La Journée bleue (1937) and Les Transparents (1951) by Tanguy, and Le Poison (1939) and L'Ovation (1962) by Magritte. 12. This applies to elements such as the clock, the smoking chimneys, the stacks of boxes, the placing of images within the image and the perspective as a whole. 13. At the same time her artistic development cannot only be linked to geographic circumstances. Russell writes, »Thereafter, the work became her biography, and vice versa. It was, in fact, remarkably untouched by the accidents of geography.« Russell, Dorothea Tanning, 1993, p. 21. Although the landscape may not affect her to any significant extent, her circumstances are important and find expression in her art in one way or another. 14. See further Dorothea Tanning, 1993, p. 114ff. 15. See Tanning, 2004, p. 213f. 16. Nor do works related to Insomnias, such as The Ill Forgotten (1955), Tempest in Yellow (1956), Touristes de Prague III (1961) and Dogs of Cythera (1963), contain landscapes although there are a number of vague similarities with some hills in the distance in the background. Despite the geographic allusions in titles such as Touristes de Prague, the paintings contain no such explicit references. 17. See also Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter, Cambridge, MA/London, 1997, p. 86. 18. Katchina refers to the dolls produced by the Hopi for various rites and Max Ernst's dog was called Kachina. See further Sigrid Metken's article »‘Zehntausend Rothäute …’: Max Ernst bei den Indianern Nordamerikas«, in Max Ernst: Retrospektive zum 100. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Spies, Munich, 1991, pp. 357–362. See Max Ernst: uvre-Katalog. Werke 1939–1953, ed. Werner Spies, Cologne, 1987, p. 166ff, no. 2616ff with reference to Max Ernst's cement blocks for the house in Sedona. See also the photograph of Ernst with his collection of Katchina dolls on p. 321 in Max Ernst, 1991. 19. Alain Bosquet, La peinture de Dorothea Tanning, Paris, 1966, p. 83. 20. Bosquet, 1966, p. 84. 21. Bosquet,, 1966, pp. 83–84. 22. Bosquet, 1966, p. 84. 23. See Peter Linde, Droger och diktare, Malmö, 1989, p. 89ff and p., 102ff on Michaux. 24. Söderberg, 1993, p. 32. 25. Caws, 1997 is a welcome exception as the author deals with Tanning's work in its entirety. 26. Chadwick, 2002, p. 12. 27. Bruy, 2006, p. 116 on Tanning's interest in alchemy with reference to her novel Chasm: A Weekend (new edition, 2004). Max Ernst's bird Loplop is perhaps the best known example of a Surrealist alter ego. 28. Although this is not the place to do so, it would be interesting to follow this lead here. Ernst took his dog Kachina with him when he moved into Tanning's home in 1942, and they subsequently acquired other dogs together. See Tanning, 2004, p. 65, Metken, in Spies, 1991, p. 358. The dog also pops up in late works by Tanning such as Family Portrait (1977) and Reality (1973–83). In her early work Tableau vivant (1954) a dog is dancing with a naked, loose-limbed young woman. The dog is generally assigned many different roles and no uniform interpretation that would cover all of these seems credible. 29. Bruy, 2006, p., 116: »Tanning geht den Weg ins Unbewusste nicht innerhalb einer Gruppe, wie die Surrealisten, sondern es ist ein eigenes intuitives Eindringen in ihr persönliches inneres Erleben und in körperliche Erfahrungen, die sie in ihrer eigenen Vergangenheit gemacht hat.« 30. Bruy, 2006, p. 118. 31. Bruy, 2006, p. 119. 32. Bruy, 2006, p. 120. 33. Cf. Bruy, 2006, p. 119, where she provides a summary bringing together Carrington, Fini and Tanning. 34. Important texts in this regard are Laura Mulvey's still seminal article »Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) and Mary Ann Doanes, »Film and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator« (1982), in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones, London, 2003, pp. 44–53 and pp. 60–72. 35. Silvia Eiblmayr, Die Frau als Bild. Der weibliche Körper in der Kunst des, 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1993, p. 153. See also Bruy, 2006, p. 117, where she refers to Eiblmayr's study. 36. Donald Kuspit, »Dorothea Tanning«, in Dorothea Tanning: On Paper, 1948–1986, exh. cat., New York, 1987, unpaginated. 37. Mary Ann Caws also mentions the Baroque on the subject of Tanning's Insomnias and its drama. See Caws, 1997, p. 66 and p. 68ff. 38. Mary Ann Caws writes, with which I do not agree, that Insomnias does not require an active approach; she maintains instead: »It is not that the observer actively has to question what the work is about but rather that the multiple signs indicate many things.« This multiplicity nevertheless calls for an active stance on the part of the viewer while, with regard to these fragmented works in particular, one is confronted with a different type of painting: one that requires a different approach than her earlier paintings. See Caws, 1997, p. 74. 39. I do not maintain, however, that Insomnias introduces this transformation at a single stroke, but that she had already been laying the groundwork for this change in earlier works. The fact that Tanning herself writes that Insomnias was something entirely new recalls rather her mystification of Birthday as her first work. Cf. Tanning, 2004, p. 327: »Insomnias, for example, the work that literally splintered away from those early paintings, was the first in a series of pure experiments where paint and perception are lost in each other.«
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