'Come, let’s go into the studio'
'I’ll show you some new pictures'
'But please don’t ask me to explain them'
'I just don’t think it’s possible'
'I paint'
'I can only describe this as a drive'
Dorothea Tanning was a surrealist artist who enjoyed a very long career
A 70-year career as a painter and a writer and a sculptor
She was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois where she famously said 'nothing happened but the wallpaper'
And she lived a long life, up to 101, dying in New York
She was very glamourous
She dressed in beautiful clothing
She seemed very ‘coiffé’, very elegant
Max Ernst befriended Dorothea Tanning in the Christmas of 1942
And Dorothea Tanning in her memoirs describes him as her Christmas present
Before he left her studio he asked her if she played chess
A romance effectively blossomed over the game of chess and over surrealism and their shared circle
And by 1946 they were married
And married, curiously, in a joint wedding ceremony in Hollywood with Man Ray and Juliet Browner
As a couple, working together in a house they built in Sedona made of wood
Without heat or running water or anything fancy
And they persisted to just totally immerse themselves in their art
'Arizona'
'You could almost cut my life in two'
'Before and after Sedona, Arizona'
There are several motifs which recur in Tanning’s work
Doors
Sunflowers, fabulous large sunflowers
Which was the only flower that could grow
in Sedona, Arizona, where she was living
And little girls
'Behind the door, or I should say the doors'
'Always another door'
And in perhaps one of her best known works, 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' of 1943
We see two little girls in a corridor
It’s not a house, it’s actually a hotel space
Because 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' refers to
Mozart’s serenade
It can be translated as ‘A Little Night Music’
The surrealists always said revolution occurred at night, and not at day
In dream, not in the conscious life
And these little girls inhabit, I think, that very strong sense of the power of dreams to
actually make us see the world differently
'How many women sit in front of the mirror like this?'
'Dreaming of glorious looks'
Here’s a quote from Dorothea: ‘Keep your eye on your inner world and keep
away from ads, idiots and movie stars’
It isn’t that she didn’t like movie stars
It’s simply, keep your eye on the ball
Pay attention to your own dreams
To your own visions
By the mid 1960s Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst
are living in France
And she said herself…
'One day I got fed up with the turpentine'
'Really fed up'
'And started making stuffed figures'
'All on the sewing machine'
'I set myself terrible goals'
'Terrible challenges'
And then she produces what she herself described in a letter as perhaps her most surrealist work
Which was ‘Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202’ Which was an installation where we have a
lot of her ideas coming into their own as a hotel room
And in this room, it’s not any hotel room
It’s where we have figures again escaping the walls
Ripping the wallpaper
We have furniture which is before our eyes metamorphosing into limbs, legs, thighs
Very dark, it’s quite uncanny and macabre
'Some people said "they won’t last"'
'"Too bad they aren’t hard", things like that'
'They might as well have said, "too bad they aren’t dead"'
And why was this?
It was because life and love themselves are
soft and they don’t live forever either
So that fragility was something she was trying
to capture in the sculptures
She was, I think, basically a very happy person
I think she was loved as a child
I think she was extremely happy in her marriage
And she was a lot of fun to be with
As far as those images that she paints
I don’t see them as particularly sinister
I see them as dreams
And we all have scary dreams
And it’s what you make out of your scary dreams
And how you resolve those scary dreams, as far as I'm concerned
'Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity'
'I don’t see a different purpose for it now'
Her art was how she made sense of the world she saw around her