Oldest living surrealist tells all

Dorothea Tanning, painter, sculptor, writer and wife of Max Ernst, counsels young artists: "Keep your eye on your inner world and keep away from ads, idiots and movie stars."

By John Glassie

Feb 11, 2002 | Dorothea Tanning's paintings and sculpture are featured in "Surrealism: Desire Unbound," a major exhibition that opened Feb. 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She is one of the only surviving members of the movement that, more than 60 years ago, turned the perceived world -- as well as the art world -- on its ear.

"As for still being here," says Tanning, 91, "I can only apologize." And as for surrealism, maybe the movement itself should apologize to Tanning for casting such a long shadow over her subsequent efforts as a painter, sculptor and printmaker, and more recently, as a writer and poet.

Today, she still paints and draws, and attends exhibitions of her work from the last few decades -- images that almost always evoke the female human form. But mainly she has been building a literary career for herself enviable to any young writer.

Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including the New Republic, the Yale Review, Partisan Review and the Paris Review. Last year, she was selected for inclusion in "The Best American Poetry 2000." And last fall, Tanning published "Between Lives: An Artist and Her World," a memoir of her long, heady and, one must say, romantically bohemian time on Earth.

Born in 1910 in Galesburg, Ill., Tanning moved by herself to Chicago at the age of 20 to study painting, where she met her "first eccentrics," she writes in her memoir. "They float through antic evenings to the sound of jazz and the tinkling of glasses containing icy drinks." A few years later, alone again on a bus and with no planned accommodations, she went on to New York.

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!

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