The Brooklyn Rail

Stunning. That adjective just about does it, grasping both celebrations: Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning at Kasmin Gallery, September 4 through October 24; and Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning, Amy Lyford: Reaktion Books, 2024.

Before any further exclamations, let me say that I’m not at all coming to this with a disinterested point of view, ah no. I knew and greatly appreciated Dorothea Tanning, who, many years ago in New York, had asked me to write a book about and with her. I met Tanning through my work on and devotion to Joseph Cornell, whose application for a Guggenheim fellowship Tanning had evaluated, less highly than I would have, but I am ever an enthusiast.

That project would have taken many years, rightly so, and I was involved in much else. Tanning was just beginning her soft sculptures (I was later photographed in an exhibition in Malmö, with some of them)—but life went on, as it does when we are lucky. And, how very glad I am, that I did not and could not take up the gauntlet, because in no way could I have approximated Amy Lyford’s devoted thirty year gestation of this grand summation of Tanning’s work.

Where even to begin? In Amy Lyford’s magnificently comprehensive and comprehending pages, there is no point at which one thinks: “oh, why can’t she stop here?” How greatly do I admire both the patience and the skill of vision in Amy Lyford’s work. In the introduction, she points out the indefatigable character of Tanning, and let me say exactly that same thing about Lyford, whom I knew slightly through her uncle, Baylis Thomas, a brilliant psychologist who greatly helped me, and also how necessary it would have been to do justice to the work of Dorothea Tanning in so many realms: drawing, painting, sculpture, sewing, printmaking, and I could go on. How glad we are, all of us reading this grand biography, that the author did continue.

Lyford waxes eloquent about much in Tanning’s work, for example the very active young girls whom she rightly deems “miseducated,” and about such paintings as Interior with Sudden Joy (1951), which she places alongside Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Tanning’s comparisons wax incomparably intelligent, and how could we be surprised that she would end up with that most intelligent of Dada personalities, Max Ernst?

Speaking of Tanning’s “layering of forms,” Lyford writes:

This method created tension between edge and center, inside and outside, concrete bodies and the amorphous spaces in which they exist. She created a new way to captivate her viewers and work that represented the experience of time passing and bodies moving through space…. She refrained from the creation of a clear center or edge; instead, she lured the viewers in so that they would be pushed to look carefully, moving their eyes around her paintings, so that they would have to interpret the works’ meaning, guided by her imagery but also their own aesthetic habits, preoccupations, and cultural or historical references.

After Max Ernst died in 1976, Tanning moved back to New York as a writer and a painter. I was delighted to be able to give her a proper reception at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where I was so happy to teach for an entire fifty years. Many of Dorothea’s friends showed up from her various resident places, and we had a joyous time of it.

In this truly exciting exhibition at the Kasmin Gallery let me signal just one extraordinary and yet typical work by Dorothea Tanning. It introduces the exhibition, and, at least to me, it signals the most valuable gift from Dorothea Tanning to the viewer, which I read as an invitation to participate.

Here it is, and with its already pointing state, and its glorious enigma, I would like to end my hopefully unending celebration of Dorothea Tanning, as joyfully incomplete and enigmatic. I firmly believe that the enigmatic, multiple, and wide-reaching creator she remained, would have wanted it that way.