“Please don’t ask me to explain them,” Dorothea Tanning once said of her paintings. “I just don’t think it’s possible.”
Tanning, who died in 2012 at the age of 101, had a career in the arts that spanned several movements, but Surrealism was always close to her heart. She was working as a commercial artist in New York when the Museum of Modern Art mounted its influential 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, a show that had a lasting impact on the young painter’s aesthetic interests and style. She would become known, for the next seven decades, for her figurative paintings, which often portrayed women and girls navigating labyrinths of doorways.
Tanning’s love of Surrealism was also personal. Her introduction to the circle of émigré Surrealists in New York segued into a 30-year marriage to the German painter and sculptor Max Ernst. Tanning too experimented with sculpture, as well as writing fiction and poetry.
Following a 2018 retrospective that traveled from Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía to London’s Tate Modern, Tanning’s latest posthumous exhibition is Musical Chairs, at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. The show, which includes a handful of works by Tanning alongside real chairs (not made by Tanning), centers on the exhibition’s namesake, a painting that’s on view for the first time in the United States in over 70 years.
The 1951 canvas shows a female figure bent in a contortionist’s pose as she slides off the red velvet upholstery of a tilting chair. The background is a torrent of yellow and green fabric, another chair partially obscured. While essentially Surrealist, the picture also boasts elements of Futurism — a movement that preceded Surrealism and prioritized capturing a sense of motion — and even Cubism, the crumpled fabric evoking a sense of fractured space. Perpetual motion and shifting vantages would remain hallmarks of the painter’s career.
The broad range of influences on Tanning’s practice are even more apparent in the juxtaposition of Musical Chairs with Door 84, which Tanning painted 33 years later in 1984. The piece consists of two canvases bisected by a wooden door protruding vertically from the wall. Each canvas contains a colorful, expressionistic rendering of a female figure straining to keep the door closed from either side. The diptych merges assemblage, an Abstract Expressionist painting style and Pop sensibilities, something like a hybrid of Jasper Johns, Joan Mitchell and Lisa Yuskavage. Clearly, in the decades after Musical Chairs, Tanning incorporated even more artistic influences into her repertoire, synthesizing them all through a Surrealist lens.
