Dorothea Tanning was born on August 25, 1910, in Galesburg, Illinois. She lived 101 years and spent nearly all of them painting the female body as a place you could walk through. Her nudes never pose. They open.
Tanning came to Surrealism from the margins, the way most of the movement’s women did. She worked as a commercial illustrator in Chicago and New York, teaching herself to paint after hours. The turning point arrived in 1936, when she walked into the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.” Within a few years, Europe’s Surrealists had fled to New York to escape the war, and Tanning found her way into the circle around André Breton.
In 1942 she painted “Birthday,” the self-portrait that made her name. She stands bare-breasted in the center of the canvas, her blouse and skirt flung open, a small winged creature at her feet. Behind her, a door opens onto a corridor of doors, each swinging onto the next and receding forever. It is a self-portrait at the threshold of a life she was about to choose. The body is a doorway, and the doorway leads inward.
That inward turn was her real subject. Surrealism adored the female body, but usually as an object to dismantle, rearrange, and desire. Tanning kept the body whole and gave it an interior. In “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” (1943), a girl with hair standing on end faces a giant sunflower on a hotel landing. In “Maternity” (1946-47), a nude mother and child stand in an endless desert, swaddled in cloth, monumental and strange. In “The Guest Room” (1950-52), a girl holds a door while a figure that might be herself slips through it. The nude female figure keeps arriving at a threshold: a door, a mirror, a wall about to give way.
In 1946 she married Max Ernst in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills. The marriage lasted until Ernst’s death in 1976, and through it Tanning kept her own name and her own line of work.
Past sixty, she began making soft sculptures: life-size bodies stitched from fabric and stuffing, pressed into walls, wedged behind doors, spilling from a fireplace in her room-sized installation “Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202” (1970-73). The figures are anonymous, faceless, and permanently in motion. They read as a grown woman’s answer to her male peers’ obsession with the doll: bodies that cannot be posed, only inhabited.
Tanning outlived nearly everyone she had painted alongside. Breton died in 1966, Ernst in 1976. She worked into her nineties and turned increasingly to writing, publishing poetry and the memoir “Between Lives” (2001). She died on January 31, 2012, at 101, having spent her last decades insisting that the female body in art could be a site of consciousness and agency.
On the 116th anniversary of her birth, that remains her quiet revolution. In Tanning’s art, the naked body looks back, and it knows the way through the door.
Explore more stories about the body in art in our collections, or get involved with nude art today.