Dorothea Tanning

This study overhauls canonical accounts of Surrealism, demonstrating how one woman artist expanded its activity and expression in bold new ways for the modern age

The life and art of Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) exemplify the transnational spirit and nomadic practice of Surrealism, an achievement made all the harder because the artist was a woman. In Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World we travel with Tanning across lived places and imagined spaces in Chicago, Arizona, Paris, and Seillans, through to her final years in New York.

Expertly drawing from extensive archival and curatorial research to map the artist’s life story across a seventy-year career, Alyce Mahon situates Tanning at the very heart of avant-garde discussions on art and philosophical ideas. She explores how this circle of relationships informed Tanning’s work at critical moments of her career and how she navigated the difficulty of being the wife of a male artist already established on the international stage. Mahon demonstrates how Tanning’s work expanded postwar global Surrealism in offering a world of kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting perspectives.

Author Biography

Alyce Mahon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968; Eroticism and Art; The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde, and numerous essays on Surrealism and the international avant-garde.