Surrealism: the orgins and thoughts about the war on logic...
When we left for social distancing, we were looking at the end of Impressionism and the start of Expressionism, specifically the work created by Van Gogh. We will have a chance to come back and visit working in the expressionistic way Van Gogh works, especially if we can get everyone pastels or paints. Working in his manner is both freeing and helps us let go of perfection, which makes it easier to work in the exploratory way of the early abstraction of the modern art era (1860's to 1950's). Look at the way artists played off each other in this time like dominos. Every artist that explored making art in a slightly unique, new manner, influenced the next artist looking to create in a new way. To loosely look at art this way and simply study the formal style art was making, it seemed as if art was growing more and more abstract with each new domino. That is until the end of the first world war. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with some World War 1 material. Check out 1917 if you like, or read "All's Quiet On The Western Front." Both sources give you a slight understanding of the trench warfare that crushed an entire generation. The madness of that experience left so many challenged. Many were "broken" by the experience, and needed help overcoming the shell shock and trauma of war. What began from the mind of Andrea Breton, a poet, who helped so many by using Freudian Psychology to listen to soldiers talk about their experience, and work to help them become productive members of society again, was the art movement know as Surrealism. On this page, I hope to give you a variety of stories, and images that will help you understand the art movement that stood out in the early abstract environment of the 20th Century...
Dada and Surrealism
Reports from the Unconscious
Out of lives disrupted by war in the first half of the century came art forms and perspectives independent of terrestrial topographies. Artists on the cutting edge worked from the inside out, selecting from nature only what expressed their personal visions. Unlike Cubism and Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism had more to do with mental--especially subconcious--processes and a philosophy of the irrational than with a specific style or technique.
In the case of Dada--a movement whose name was reportedly composed of random nonsense syllables--artists and writers uprooted by World War I dispersed the movement to cities throughout Europe and to New York. In a counter-Futurist kind of way, their nihilistic manifestoes and other writings protested war, industrialization, and other dehumanizing offenses of modern life. Dada's multimedia creations were chaotic, absurd, and humorous, and they took the forms of performances, "readymades" or found objects, self-destroying machines, and mystifying abstractions.
In politically charged Berlin, Hannah Höch (1879-1978) reordered reality in radical photomontages, a medium that she and her companion, Raoul Hausmann, are credited with inventing. Höch mined a rich range of print sources to find the ingredients for her provocative fusions of photographic images--one of her first such pieces, Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1919-20), illustrates the process of the new art form. To make the work, whose title refers menacingly to women's traditional realm, she cut out text and photo fragments, using a collage technique to fashion fantastic compositions that comment wryly upon the experience of life in Weimar Berlin in the wake of World War I. She combined areas of paint with photographic images of hardware, buildings, disconnected heads and bodies, and figures in motion in and about images of modern life, including the modern machinery of war. Cut-out "dada" texts weave backward and forward among the images. Comic touches such as circus performers mark her style. Höch remained in Germany through the Nazi era and World War II, at the cost of largely refraining from political statements.
The German-born Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) had been a chorus girl, artist, poet, and muse before emigrating to the United States in 1910. Abandoned in New York in 1913 by Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven after their brief marriage, she gravitated to Greenwich Village. She supported herself as an artist's model, and, seen around the streets in the nude or draped with fruit and cookware, became a highly visible "character" even in that bohemian community of artists and intellectuals. Because theatricality was so essential an aspect of Dada, her poses for Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia render the resulting works in effect collaborations. Her "junk art" 1918 Dada portrait of the photographer Berenice Abbott, who called von Freytag-Loringhoven a friend and a great influence, is made from a brush, stones, metal objects, cloth, paint, and various detritus. Her 1920 portrait of Duchamp was an elegant but short-lived "bouquet" with feathers and metal gears in a champagne glass. Like much of today's conceptual art, it survives only in a photograph.
In some respects, Surrealism was an outgrowth of Dada, as Salvador Dalí, Duchamp, and others renounced protest and absurdity in favor of the dislocated, symbolic imagery of the subconscious. Gathered around the founding father, the writer and critic André Breton--a great admirer of Frida Kahlo--the Surrealists embraced certain theories of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. Responding to the power of dreams, letting themselves go to the predictable results of "automatism," spontaneous drawing and writing, the Surrealists became a major force in art beginning in the 1920s.
Initially, women were important to the Surrealists not as artists but as muses and lovers. As sexual creatures who inspired creativity they were loved; as real women and mothers who would squelch men's freedom they were feared. Paintings by Max Ernst, Duchamp, and Dalí are rife with controlling violence and brutality against women. Nevertheless, attracted by the Surrealists' democracy-of-the-mind mentality, their wholehearted commitment to avant-garde art, the fun, and, for some, the sexually charged, creative atmosphere surrounding them, women were drawn into their circle. Most were a generation younger than their mates, and were adored as long as they remained the femme-enfant, the Surrealist ideal of the child-woman.
Visionary and symbolic, the women's imagery frequently incorporated dreamscapes and architectural interiors in which women were strong, dominant figures controlling their environments. Water and egg imagery, symbols of rebirth and regeneration, appear frequently. Many of the women developed strong friendships: Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Meret Oppenheim in Paris, and later, in Mexico, Carrington and Remedios Varo. Like their male cohorts, some of the female Surrealists also published short stories, poetry, and memoirs, and espoused sexual liberation--the Marquis de Sade was a Surrealist hero. Fini and Tanning also transmit some of this sexual charge in their work.
Leonor Fini (1908-1996) lived what she believed. Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Trieste, she was acquainted with Carlo Carrà and the Futurists before she moved to Paris in the 1930s. True to her independence, she refused to marry and resisted joining the Surrealists because of their disparaging attitude toward women, although she counted group members among her friends and exhibited with them. Fini's early works often feature beautiful women presiding over events. They are commanding figures, whether shown bare-breasted and seductive, as in Composition with Figures on a Terrace (1939), or armored, as in Young Girl in Armour (n.d.). Fini portrays herself in the former as lion-maned and powerful. Males, when present, play a secondary role, even that of victim. These imagined scenes, like Fini's detailed still lifes of decaying plants, are beautifully rendered in precise detail.
The Czech-born Marie Cermínová (1902-1980), known as Toyen, did poetic abstractions before she and her husband, the painter Jindrich Styrsky, discovered Surrealism in Prague. At first influenced by Styrsky's obsession with The Marquis de Sade (the couple illustrated his stories), Toyen's work maintained their erotic edge. In Relâche (1943)--the title has several meanings, including "respite" and "relax"--the pose is impossible, the setting ominous, the pale virginal skin and props (sack and riding crop) frighteningly real and highly evocative of what might be coming. Briefly, after World War II, Toyen turned her attention to political statements in works like Before Spring (1945), a landscape with rows of stone grave mounds, evocative of what had come.
During the war years, when Ernst, Breton, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and other Surrealists emigrated to New York City, Kay Sage (1898-1963) arranged for exhibitions of their work and helped them establish new lives. From a prominent upstate New York family, Sage had lived in Europe on and off with her erratic mother, and for ten years was married to an Italian prince. She became involved with the Surrealists shortly after arriving in Paris in 1937, and later, in New York, she married Tanguy. Her command of painting belies her sparse formal training, and though she had begun by recording the Italian countryside, her work quickly became abstract, stark, sweeping dreamscapes. Curving forms fill My Room Has Two Doors (1939), a work that shows the influence of the Italian Surrealist Giorgio De Chirico: a large egg rests above a stairway to nowhere, against a rising wall, near a shadowy archway. In Danger, Construction Ahead (1940) there is no possibility of a human presence in either of the spiky formations joined across a chilly prospect by a slender bridge. Sage also wrote poetry in English, French, and Italian. Despondent after Tanguy's death in 1955 and a partial loss of vision, she failed an attempt at suicide, but succeeded the second time, eight years later.
Among the most memorable Surrealist objects are Eileen Agar's Angel of Anarchy and Meret Oppenheim's Fur-Lined Teacup (both 1936). Agar (1899/1904-1991) was painting abstractions in Paris in the late 1920s when she was introduced to Surrealism. Back home in England, she began exploring automatic methods and unusual juxtapositions in her paintings and experimenting with collage. She was one of a group of British artists who actively protested war and promoted art; Angel of Anarchy, a sculptural response to the Spanish Civil War, is a plaster cast of her husband's head mysteriously shrouded in sensuous silks, and adorned with feathers, beads, and shells. Agar continued co-opting found elements into fantasy objects and paintings.
Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985), daughter of a German-Swiss Jungian psychologist, in many ways resembled Meretlein, the free-spirited character in a German novel for whom she was named. Arriving in Paris in 1932, she quickly found Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, and Man Ray. Although she continued drawing, painting, designing, and assembling clever and fanciful objects for the next fifty years, it is one piece, Fur-Lined Teacup (1936), that is synonymous with her name and, for many, with Surrealism. Oppenheim had decorated a bracelet with fur, and Picasso jokingly commented that fur could cover anything. Her response was another joke: a fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, Le Déjeuner en fourrure, its official name. Breton included the piece in the landmark Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism exhibition in 1936 at New York's Museum of Modern Art--which purchased it on the spot. Oppenheim was just twenty-two years old.
The Parisian Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993) was attracted to Breton's writings, which addressed art and politics, her two principal interests, and to Breton: the two married during the turbulent decade (of 1934-1943), during which they fled the war, first to Mexico and, finally, New York. Lamba practiced automatism, giving expression to her unconscious in dreamscapes that have often been compared with those of Masson and the Chilean painter Matta. The invented flower forms that make up In Spite of Everything, Spring (1942) seem to materialize through an internal prism.
Leonora Carrington (b. 1917) left England in 1937 to live in Paris with Max Ernst. During their three years together, through intensive self-exploration, she developed a personal mythology and pictorial vocabulary. In both stories and paintings, female characters--often including the artist--encountered a bestiary of real and imagined creatures. A white horse, in particular, variously represents mythic, transformative, sexual, and, when a rocking horse, nurturing and magical powers. Ernst, a German, was arrested, then failed to return to her after his release; Carrington was devastated by their separation, and she, too, eventually sought refuge in Mexico, where later, marriage and the birth of her children were energizing forces.
In Mexico, Carrington's close friend and fellow spiritual traveler was Remedios Varo (1913-1963). Simultaneously and independently, they both evolved a mature Surrealist idiom in which the practice of alchemy synthesized woman's domestic identity and spiritual longings. Varo and her husband, the Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, had left Spain after the Civil War, settling first in Paris, then, after 1942, in Mexico. As a teenager, Varo had escaped rigid convent school life through a brief marriage, but she never totally abandoned the church: she joined aspects of Catholic mysticism with alchemy and hermetic occult traditions in her quest for creative and spiritual fulfillment. Her intense, arcane compositions frequently feature fantastic creatures and machines--an interest acquired from her father, a hydraulic engineer--that are powered by natural forces such as light, water, or sound. One of these vessels carries the sophisticated traveler in Varo's Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River (1959), to a fountain springing in a gleaming goblet, a holy chalice of sorts.
Determined to meet Ernst and the other Surrealists after seeing their 1936 exhibition in New York, Dorothea Tanning (b. 1912) arrived in Paris in 1939, just as the war was breaking out. Having been inspired more by the extravagant illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley than by the art education she received at home in Galesburg, Illinois, and in Chicago, she had seen in the Surrealists' visions something akin to her own. When Tanning finally met Ernst, back in New York, where her work was being shown at the Art of the Century gallery, owned by his wife, Peggy Guggenheim, they fell in love. After living for a number of years in Sedona, Arizona, they returned to France, where Tanning lived and worked until after Ernst's death in 1976. Many of Tanning's early paintings contain strong images of female sexual transformation. In Birthday (1942), the bare-breasted artist celebrates the beginning of an uncertain maturity (with Ernst), while in Jeux d'Enfants (Children's Games) (1942), the wall comes to life, sucking in two of the disheveled young girls, one by the hair, while a third has succumbed to its power. Likewise, in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1946) and Palaestra (1949), strangely suspended prepubescent girls inhabit enigmatic corridors defined by open and closed doors. In contrast with their allusive, oneiric subject matter, Tanning's dream images, filled with mystery and foreboding, are exquisitely detailed and finished.
Reports from the Unconscious
Out of lives disrupted by war in the first half of the century came art forms and perspectives independent of terrestrial topographies. Artists on the cutting edge worked from the inside out, selecting from nature only what expressed their personal visions. Unlike Cubism and Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism had more to do with mental--especially subconcious--processes and a philosophy of the irrational than with a specific style or technique.
In the case of Dada--a movement whose name was reportedly composed of random nonsense syllables--artists and writers uprooted by World War I dispersed the movement to cities throughout Europe and to New York. In a counter-Futurist kind of way, their nihilistic manifestoes and other writings protested war, industrialization, and other dehumanizing offenses of modern life. Dada's multimedia creations were chaotic, absurd, and humorous, and they took the forms of performances, "readymades" or found objects, self-destroying machines, and mystifying abstractions.
In politically charged Berlin, Hannah Höch (1879-1978) reordered reality in radical photomontages, a medium that she and her companion, Raoul Hausmann, are credited with inventing. Höch mined a rich range of print sources to find the ingredients for her provocative fusions of photographic images--one of her first such pieces, Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1919-20), illustrates the process of the new art form. To make the work, whose title refers menacingly to women's traditional realm, she cut out text and photo fragments, using a collage technique to fashion fantastic compositions that comment wryly upon the experience of life in Weimar Berlin in the wake of World War I. She combined areas of paint with photographic images of hardware, buildings, disconnected heads and bodies, and figures in motion in and about images of modern life, including the modern machinery of war. Cut-out "dada" texts weave backward and forward among the images. Comic touches such as circus performers mark her style. Höch remained in Germany through the Nazi era and World War II, at the cost of largely refraining from political statements.
The German-born Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) had been a chorus girl, artist, poet, and muse before emigrating to the United States in 1910. Abandoned in New York in 1913 by Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven after their brief marriage, she gravitated to Greenwich Village. She supported herself as an artist's model, and, seen around the streets in the nude or draped with fruit and cookware, became a highly visible "character" even in that bohemian community of artists and intellectuals. Because theatricality was so essential an aspect of Dada, her poses for Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia render the resulting works in effect collaborations. Her "junk art" 1918 Dada portrait of the photographer Berenice Abbott, who called von Freytag-Loringhoven a friend and a great influence, is made from a brush, stones, metal objects, cloth, paint, and various detritus. Her 1920 portrait of Duchamp was an elegant but short-lived "bouquet" with feathers and metal gears in a champagne glass. Like much of today's conceptual art, it survives only in a photograph.
In some respects, Surrealism was an outgrowth of Dada, as Salvador Dalí, Duchamp, and others renounced protest and absurdity in favor of the dislocated, symbolic imagery of the subconscious. Gathered around the founding father, the writer and critic André Breton--a great admirer of Frida Kahlo--the Surrealists embraced certain theories of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. Responding to the power of dreams, letting themselves go to the predictable results of "automatism," spontaneous drawing and writing, the Surrealists became a major force in art beginning in the 1920s.
Initially, women were important to the Surrealists not as artists but as muses and lovers. As sexual creatures who inspired creativity they were loved; as real women and mothers who would squelch men's freedom they were feared. Paintings by Max Ernst, Duchamp, and Dalí are rife with controlling violence and brutality against women. Nevertheless, attracted by the Surrealists' democracy-of-the-mind mentality, their wholehearted commitment to avant-garde art, the fun, and, for some, the sexually charged, creative atmosphere surrounding them, women were drawn into their circle. Most were a generation younger than their mates, and were adored as long as they remained the femme-enfant, the Surrealist ideal of the child-woman.
Visionary and symbolic, the women's imagery frequently incorporated dreamscapes and architectural interiors in which women were strong, dominant figures controlling their environments. Water and egg imagery, symbols of rebirth and regeneration, appear frequently. Many of the women developed strong friendships: Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Meret Oppenheim in Paris, and later, in Mexico, Carrington and Remedios Varo. Like their male cohorts, some of the female Surrealists also published short stories, poetry, and memoirs, and espoused sexual liberation--the Marquis de Sade was a Surrealist hero. Fini and Tanning also transmit some of this sexual charge in their work.
Leonor Fini (1908-1996) lived what she believed. Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Trieste, she was acquainted with Carlo Carrà and the Futurists before she moved to Paris in the 1930s. True to her independence, she refused to marry and resisted joining the Surrealists because of their disparaging attitude toward women, although she counted group members among her friends and exhibited with them. Fini's early works often feature beautiful women presiding over events. They are commanding figures, whether shown bare-breasted and seductive, as in Composition with Figures on a Terrace (1939), or armored, as in Young Girl in Armour (n.d.). Fini portrays herself in the former as lion-maned and powerful. Males, when present, play a secondary role, even that of victim. These imagined scenes, like Fini's detailed still lifes of decaying plants, are beautifully rendered in precise detail.
The Czech-born Marie Cermínová (1902-1980), known as Toyen, did poetic abstractions before she and her husband, the painter Jindrich Styrsky, discovered Surrealism in Prague. At first influenced by Styrsky's obsession with The Marquis de Sade (the couple illustrated his stories), Toyen's work maintained their erotic edge. In Relâche (1943)--the title has several meanings, including "respite" and "relax"--the pose is impossible, the setting ominous, the pale virginal skin and props (sack and riding crop) frighteningly real and highly evocative of what might be coming. Briefly, after World War II, Toyen turned her attention to political statements in works like Before Spring (1945), a landscape with rows of stone grave mounds, evocative of what had come.
During the war years, when Ernst, Breton, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and other Surrealists emigrated to New York City, Kay Sage (1898-1963) arranged for exhibitions of their work and helped them establish new lives. From a prominent upstate New York family, Sage had lived in Europe on and off with her erratic mother, and for ten years was married to an Italian prince. She became involved with the Surrealists shortly after arriving in Paris in 1937, and later, in New York, she married Tanguy. Her command of painting belies her sparse formal training, and though she had begun by recording the Italian countryside, her work quickly became abstract, stark, sweeping dreamscapes. Curving forms fill My Room Has Two Doors (1939), a work that shows the influence of the Italian Surrealist Giorgio De Chirico: a large egg rests above a stairway to nowhere, against a rising wall, near a shadowy archway. In Danger, Construction Ahead (1940) there is no possibility of a human presence in either of the spiky formations joined across a chilly prospect by a slender bridge. Sage also wrote poetry in English, French, and Italian. Despondent after Tanguy's death in 1955 and a partial loss of vision, she failed an attempt at suicide, but succeeded the second time, eight years later.
Among the most memorable Surrealist objects are Eileen Agar's Angel of Anarchy and Meret Oppenheim's Fur-Lined Teacup (both 1936). Agar (1899/1904-1991) was painting abstractions in Paris in the late 1920s when she was introduced to Surrealism. Back home in England, she began exploring automatic methods and unusual juxtapositions in her paintings and experimenting with collage. She was one of a group of British artists who actively protested war and promoted art; Angel of Anarchy, a sculptural response to the Spanish Civil War, is a plaster cast of her husband's head mysteriously shrouded in sensuous silks, and adorned with feathers, beads, and shells. Agar continued co-opting found elements into fantasy objects and paintings.
Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985), daughter of a German-Swiss Jungian psychologist, in many ways resembled Meretlein, the free-spirited character in a German novel for whom she was named. Arriving in Paris in 1932, she quickly found Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, and Man Ray. Although she continued drawing, painting, designing, and assembling clever and fanciful objects for the next fifty years, it is one piece, Fur-Lined Teacup (1936), that is synonymous with her name and, for many, with Surrealism. Oppenheim had decorated a bracelet with fur, and Picasso jokingly commented that fur could cover anything. Her response was another joke: a fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, Le Déjeuner en fourrure, its official name. Breton included the piece in the landmark Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism exhibition in 1936 at New York's Museum of Modern Art--which purchased it on the spot. Oppenheim was just twenty-two years old.
The Parisian Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993) was attracted to Breton's writings, which addressed art and politics, her two principal interests, and to Breton: the two married during the turbulent decade (of 1934-1943), during which they fled the war, first to Mexico and, finally, New York. Lamba practiced automatism, giving expression to her unconscious in dreamscapes that have often been compared with those of Masson and the Chilean painter Matta. The invented flower forms that make up In Spite of Everything, Spring (1942) seem to materialize through an internal prism.
Leonora Carrington (b. 1917) left England in 1937 to live in Paris with Max Ernst. During their three years together, through intensive self-exploration, she developed a personal mythology and pictorial vocabulary. In both stories and paintings, female characters--often including the artist--encountered a bestiary of real and imagined creatures. A white horse, in particular, variously represents mythic, transformative, sexual, and, when a rocking horse, nurturing and magical powers. Ernst, a German, was arrested, then failed to return to her after his release; Carrington was devastated by their separation, and she, too, eventually sought refuge in Mexico, where later, marriage and the birth of her children were energizing forces.
In Mexico, Carrington's close friend and fellow spiritual traveler was Remedios Varo (1913-1963). Simultaneously and independently, they both evolved a mature Surrealist idiom in which the practice of alchemy synthesized woman's domestic identity and spiritual longings. Varo and her husband, the Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, had left Spain after the Civil War, settling first in Paris, then, after 1942, in Mexico. As a teenager, Varo had escaped rigid convent school life through a brief marriage, but she never totally abandoned the church: she joined aspects of Catholic mysticism with alchemy and hermetic occult traditions in her quest for creative and spiritual fulfillment. Her intense, arcane compositions frequently feature fantastic creatures and machines--an interest acquired from her father, a hydraulic engineer--that are powered by natural forces such as light, water, or sound. One of these vessels carries the sophisticated traveler in Varo's Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River (1959), to a fountain springing in a gleaming goblet, a holy chalice of sorts.
Determined to meet Ernst and the other Surrealists after seeing their 1936 exhibition in New York, Dorothea Tanning (b. 1912) arrived in Paris in 1939, just as the war was breaking out. Having been inspired more by the extravagant illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley than by the art education she received at home in Galesburg, Illinois, and in Chicago, she had seen in the Surrealists' visions something akin to her own. When Tanning finally met Ernst, back in New York, where her work was being shown at the Art of the Century gallery, owned by his wife, Peggy Guggenheim, they fell in love. After living for a number of years in Sedona, Arizona, they returned to France, where Tanning lived and worked until after Ernst's death in 1976. Many of Tanning's early paintings contain strong images of female sexual transformation. In Birthday (1942), the bare-breasted artist celebrates the beginning of an uncertain maturity (with Ernst), while in Jeux d'Enfants (Children's Games) (1942), the wall comes to life, sucking in two of the disheveled young girls, one by the hair, while a third has succumbed to its power. Likewise, in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1946) and Palaestra (1949), strangely suspended prepubescent girls inhabit enigmatic corridors defined by open and closed doors. In contrast with their allusive, oneiric subject matter, Tanning's dream images, filled with mystery and foreboding, are exquisitely detailed and finished.
Between Lives: An Artist and Her World
By Dorothy Tanning
W.W. Norton
378 pages
Nonfiction
Buy it
http://jump.salon.com/xlink?1228
In Manhattan, eking out a living doing advertising illustrations and trying to paint on the side, she "ate curry powder sandwiches, took Hindu dancing, read the 'Bhagvad Gita' and Emily Dickinson, impartially." She also went to see the 1936 "Fantastic, Dada, and Surrealism" show at the Museum of Modern Art. She was well aware of the movement, "but here, here in the museum," she writes, " ... are signposts so imperious, so laden, so seductive, and yes, so perverse that ... they would possess me utterly."
Her subsequent paintings caught the eye of gallery dealer Julien Levy. These include the well-known 1942 self-portrait "Birthday," which showed her bare-breasted in a skirt of roots and a Elizabethan-looking jacket, surrounded by doors and thresholds, and with a rather strange friend: a lemur with wings. Through Levy she fell in with the French surrealist expats and other emerging artistic types such as, as she recalls, "Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Kurt Seligman, Bob Motherwell ... Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, Max Ernst."
She and the dadaist icon Ernst became inseparable, and soon got married in a double wedding with photographer and painter Man Ray and Juliet Browner. Tanning found herself part of an inner circle that included André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró and René Magritte, and became friends with figures such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Cornell, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote and choreographer George Balanchine.
After the war, she and Ernst moved to France, where they lived for 28 years. Tanning's work from this period is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery in London, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and many others. During the '40s and '50s, she also created costume designs for Balanchine. She began making sculptures in the early '70s -- fabric and cloth pieces that conjured up limp ballet-dancing forms.
Tanning moved back to New York in 1979 after Ernst's death. Among others, she found a friend in Pultizer Prize-winning poet James Merrill. It was Merrill "who more than anyone at that point of my life, made me realize that living was still wonderful even though I felt that my loss, Max, had left nothing but ashes," she says. "So if I took up brushes again, and the pen, to work for 20 more solitary years -- and am still at it -- it was Jimmy who made me want to, and so proved himself right." Tanning began to write and published her first book in 1986, a collection of reminiscences called "Birthday," after her most famous painting.
"Youth is certainly the big Y word around here these days," she says. Nevertheless, she is "not disappointed. I think I've been a renaissance man -- if he could have been a woman."
At the age of 91, how do feel about carrying the surrealist banner?
I guess I'll be called a surrealist forever, like a tattoo: "D. Loves S." I still believe in the surrealist effort to plumb our deepest subconscious to find out about ourselves. But please don't say I'm carrying the surrealist banner. The movement ended in the '50s and my own work had moved on so far by the '60s that being a called a surrealist today makes me feel like a fossil!
Surrealism must have had a strong appeal for you at the time.
When I saw the surrealist show at MOMA in 1936, I was impressed by its daring in addressing the tangles of the subconscious -- trawling the psyche to find its secrets, to glorify its deviance. I felt the urge to jump into the same lake -- where, by the way, I had already waded before I met any of them. Anyway, jump I did. They were a terribly attractive bunch of people. They loved New York, loved repartee, loved games. A less happy detail: They all mostly spoke in French. But I learned it later.
You came to New York to be an artist in the midst of the Depression -- just got on a bus one day from Chicago -- with no plan and without knowing where you would stay. I don't imagine there were many young woman doing that. Did you see yourself as a pioneer?
Not a pioneer but headstrong. Now when I look back, I'm amazed at my stupid bravery, going off like that with just $25. My head was full of extravagances, I'd read Coleridge and a lot of other 19th century dreamers and I had to be an artist and live in Paris. So New York was on the way. I finally got to Paris, just four weeks before Hitler started his March. Americans were told to go home; I went to my uncle's in Stockholm on a train with Hitler Youth. I got the last boat out of Gothenburg in September of 1939. In 1949, I went back to France and stayed there for 28 unbelievable years.
By Dorothy Tanning
W.W. Norton
378 pages
Nonfiction
Buy it
http://jump.salon.com/xlink?1228
In Manhattan, eking out a living doing advertising illustrations and trying to paint on the side, she "ate curry powder sandwiches, took Hindu dancing, read the 'Bhagvad Gita' and Emily Dickinson, impartially." She also went to see the 1936 "Fantastic, Dada, and Surrealism" show at the Museum of Modern Art. She was well aware of the movement, "but here, here in the museum," she writes, " ... are signposts so imperious, so laden, so seductive, and yes, so perverse that ... they would possess me utterly."
Her subsequent paintings caught the eye of gallery dealer Julien Levy. These include the well-known 1942 self-portrait "Birthday," which showed her bare-breasted in a skirt of roots and a Elizabethan-looking jacket, surrounded by doors and thresholds, and with a rather strange friend: a lemur with wings. Through Levy she fell in with the French surrealist expats and other emerging artistic types such as, as she recalls, "Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Kurt Seligman, Bob Motherwell ... Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, Max Ernst."
She and the dadaist icon Ernst became inseparable, and soon got married in a double wedding with photographer and painter Man Ray and Juliet Browner. Tanning found herself part of an inner circle that included André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró and René Magritte, and became friends with figures such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Cornell, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote and choreographer George Balanchine.
After the war, she and Ernst moved to France, where they lived for 28 years. Tanning's work from this period is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery in London, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and many others. During the '40s and '50s, she also created costume designs for Balanchine. She began making sculptures in the early '70s -- fabric and cloth pieces that conjured up limp ballet-dancing forms.
Tanning moved back to New York in 1979 after Ernst's death. Among others, she found a friend in Pultizer Prize-winning poet James Merrill. It was Merrill "who more than anyone at that point of my life, made me realize that living was still wonderful even though I felt that my loss, Max, had left nothing but ashes," she says. "So if I took up brushes again, and the pen, to work for 20 more solitary years -- and am still at it -- it was Jimmy who made me want to, and so proved himself right." Tanning began to write and published her first book in 1986, a collection of reminiscences called "Birthday," after her most famous painting.
"Youth is certainly the big Y word around here these days," she says. Nevertheless, she is "not disappointed. I think I've been a renaissance man -- if he could have been a woman."
At the age of 91, how do feel about carrying the surrealist banner?
I guess I'll be called a surrealist forever, like a tattoo: "D. Loves S." I still believe in the surrealist effort to plumb our deepest subconscious to find out about ourselves. But please don't say I'm carrying the surrealist banner. The movement ended in the '50s and my own work had moved on so far by the '60s that being a called a surrealist today makes me feel like a fossil!
Surrealism must have had a strong appeal for you at the time.
When I saw the surrealist show at MOMA in 1936, I was impressed by its daring in addressing the tangles of the subconscious -- trawling the psyche to find its secrets, to glorify its deviance. I felt the urge to jump into the same lake -- where, by the way, I had already waded before I met any of them. Anyway, jump I did. They were a terribly attractive bunch of people. They loved New York, loved repartee, loved games. A less happy detail: They all mostly spoke in French. But I learned it later.
You came to New York to be an artist in the midst of the Depression -- just got on a bus one day from Chicago -- with no plan and without knowing where you would stay. I don't imagine there were many young woman doing that. Did you see yourself as a pioneer?
Not a pioneer but headstrong. Now when I look back, I'm amazed at my stupid bravery, going off like that with just $25. My head was full of extravagances, I'd read Coleridge and a lot of other 19th century dreamers and I had to be an artist and live in Paris. So New York was on the way. I finally got to Paris, just four weeks before Hitler started his March. Americans were told to go home; I went to my uncle's in Stockholm on a train with Hitler Youth. I got the last boat out of Gothenburg in September of 1939. In 1949, I went back to France and stayed there for 28 unbelievable years.
Journal Entry:
3/31/2020: The more I learn about life from 100 years ago, the more I am impressed with the spirit of adventure and resilience of people living between the 2 world wars. Above you just read about surrealism from the artists point of view, and then an interview with Dorthea Tanning. At this stage let it sink in some. Please think on it for a little while and then write me a journal entry about what you are thinking about in regards to WW1, Surrealism, and how people 100 years ago responded to the adversity of their day... send journals to this email