A surrealist steps out of her husband’s long shadow
Dorothea Tanning Tate Modern, London SE1
This is one of the strangest exhibitions I’ve ever seen in a major public gallery. Its subject is Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), one of a number of brilliantly talented women at the heart of the surrealist movement (Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim and Dora Maar were others) who’ve been overshadowed by their better-known male partners and colleagues (Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray).
Some of Tanning’s early paintings have become well known in recent years – notably Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) – but she has never quite got beyond her role as Mrs Max Ernst, the wife of the great German surrealist. This exhibition, however, asks us to look at the American artist not just as an interesting minor surrealist, but as a substantial figure in her own right, who went on developing until her death in 2012, and whose influence can be felt in artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin.
Born into suburban respectability in Galesburg, Illinois in 1910, Tanning comes across as a redoubtable individualist from the start. Drawn to the sinister and claustrophobic via an early interest in gothic novels, she discovered surrealism through an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936, while working as an illustrator for Macy’s.
The Magic Flower Game (1941), with its flower-decked child, is just the sort of twee and saccharine approximation of a surrealist painting you’d expect a fashion illustrator to produce. Birthday (1942), however, produced a year later and just before she met Ernst, is a genuinely remarkable work: a visionary self-portrait in which the bare-breasted Tanning looks out of the canvas, with a sort of winged-monkey at her feet. If the tightly controlled treatment of the dream interior is pretty much stock Dali-meets-magritte surrealism, the assertiveness of the female figure lifts it beyond the standard male fantasy.
The twisted, nightmare mood continues in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in which two girls, one with her hair shooting upwards, half-standing/ half-floating over a landing blocked by a giant sunflower. Meanwhile, The Guest Room (1950-52), with its naked girl holding a door open to a scene in which another girl lies beside a life-size doll, a cloth-headed cowboy disports itself in the foreground and a hooded figure lurks in the shadows, is as provocatively perverse as anything Magritte or Ernst ever came up with.
Rather than keeping us scarily cooped up among Tanning’s hermetic early works, the show goes on to break the mood with a jumbled thematic approach interspersing her early surrealist works with much larger paintings she made in the Eighties that are hardly recognisable.
Tanning’s pure surrealist phase was in fact relatively brief. From the late Forties, the faceted folds in her painted drapery
– a quality she called “prismatic” – take on a writhing life of their own. By Insomnias (1957), it’s hard to tell what’s cloth and what’s flesh, as what appears to be a baby and some kind of dog dissolve into a swirling ectoplasmic morass that is at once vaporous and strangely cubistic. Whatever you think of these later paintings – and there are a lot of them, encompassing Tanning’s career from the Fifties to the Nineties – you certainly can’t accuse her of copying. She knew how to wield a brush; there’s a voluptuous, baroque flourish to her fleshy masses. At their best, such works drift into a kind of accidental abstract expressionism; at their worst they dip into illustrative kitsch, like Paula Rego on drugs – and not in a good way. Nervous, perhaps, that admirers of Tanning’s early surrealism will be growing impatient, the show then yanks us back with the large Maternity (1946-47), presented next to an extraordinary life-size 3D installation from the early Seventies, Chambre 202, Hotel du Pavot, in which upholstered anthropomorphic shapes erupt out of the furniture of a dimly lit hotel room, while flesh-coloured female body parts burst through walls.
There are more of these “sewnsculptures”, as Tanning called them, in the large final room: human-size cuddly toys in weird clinches – a gorilla and a pink-buttocked woman seem to feature frequently – or a weirdly phallic, tweed figure in a posture recalling one of Michelangelo’s Slaves chained to a post. These are works that reinforce the curators’ claims for Tanning as a cool and still relevant figure: raunchy updated surrealism with a touch of pop art. But they’re surrounded – unfortunately for the curators – by Tanning’s resolutely uncool paintings.
Even so, at a time when exhibitions tend to edit their subjects’ work, leaving out anything that doesn’t fit with contemporary taste, it’s refreshing to see this quirky artist revealed in all her diverse aspects. By the end, you’re cheering Tanning, who lived to the age of 101, for going her own way, far from the world of artistic fashion, and not giving a damn.
Until June 9. Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk