Dorothea Tanning was an amazing American artist, a pioneer of Surrealism in America and also an author. Learn about the life of surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning in this Dorothea Tanning biography. The American artist Dorothea Tanning, daughter of Swedish émigré parents, was born on 25 August 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois, USA. At the age of sixteen she became a library assistant at the Galesburg Public Library. She was deeply influenced by the books she read and considered the idea of becoming a writer. In 1928 she studied at Knox College, a local liberal arts institution, and in 1930 moved to Chicago where she enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Art, but left 3 weeks later. She was largely selftaught as an artist.
In 1936 she visited the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and saw works by René Magritte, Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Marcel Duchamp and many others. The surrealist paintings had a profound effect on her.
In 1942 she met Max Ernst who was organising, with his wife Peggy Guggenheim, an exhibition of 31 female artists at her Art of this Century Gallery in New York. Ernst selected Tanning’s painting Birthday for the exhibition.
Dorothea Tanning’s work often combines a sinister sexuality with a fairytale childlike sensibility which is reminiscent of surrealist childhood fantasies and nightmares.
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst married in October 1946 and moved to Sedona, Arizona, USA. Later, whilst building their house there, Tanning wrote Abyss, a gothicflavoured, desert adventure short story that became the novel ‘Chasm: A Weekend’ first published in 1949.
Around 1955 Tanning’s paintings moved away from meticulously rendered figurative dreamscapes due to her newfound interest in costume and stage design for the.
Tanning’s first retrospective exhibition took place in Belgium in 1967. When Ernst died in 1976, aged 84, Tanning was bereft. She published her memoir Birthday in 1986, and in 1994 established the Wallace Stevens Award for poetry. She created her last known paintings in 1998 but she continued to write until her death on 21 January 2012, aged 101.

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