Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois, and passed away in Manhattan, New York in 2012 at the age of 101. Tanning's extensive career as a painter, sculptor, and writer evolved throughout her years living and working in both the United States and Paris. In the early years of her career, Tanning's work adopted a Surrealist aesthetic. As her career progressed and as she connected with members of the Surrealist group in the U.S., her artwork became increasingly experimental, advancing from her painterly figurative compositions to prismatic abstractions, and to her soft cloth sculptures and installations. Tanning's oeuvre includes over 1,500 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, all of which have been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad. Her work has been acquired by museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; The Menil Collection, Houston; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.

During her lifetime, Tanning's work was the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2000); Camden Arts Centre, London (1993); Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (1993); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (1974). More recently, in 2018, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid in collaboration with Tate Modern, London presented a major solo survey exhibition of Dorothea Tanning that explored key themes spanning seven decades of the artist's seminal career. The exhibition opened at the Museo Reina Sofía in October of 2018 and traveled to the Tate Modern in February of 2019. Tanning's work has also been included in a number of thematic museum group shows: Nick Mauss: Transmissions, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired By Her Writings, Tate St. Ives, curated by Laura Smith (2018); Disobedient Bodies, Hepworth Gallery Wakefield, Yorkshire (2017); The Beguiling Siren is Thy Crest, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2017); Making & Unmaking: An exhibition curated by Duro Olowu, Camden Arts Centre, London (2016); Beyond Realism: Dada and Surrealism, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2019); Photography and the Surreal Imagination, The Menil Collection, Houston (2020); Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2020); Surrealism Beyond Borders, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London (2021- 2022); The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); and Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and the Museum Barberini, Potsdam (2022).

After the death of her husband, Max Ernst, in 1976, Tanning returned to the United States to live in New York, where she continued to paint, collaborated with poets, and became actively involved in the literary circles of the city. Tanning published two collections of poetry, Coming to That (2011) and A Table of Content (2011), as well as two memoirs, Birthday (1986) and Between Lives (2001), and a short novel, Chasm (2004).