Poster, Dorothéa Tanning, Insomnias

Dimensions: 50 x 70 cm

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 and was expected to become an actress by her parents. But it was the visual arts that she was drawn to, and she announced her intention to become a painter early on. When she was fifteen, she scandalized her parents by painting a nude woman with leaves instead of hair: they realized to their horror that their daughter was a "bohemian".

Encountering Alfred Barr's legendary exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at MoMA in New York in 1936 was immediately decisive for Dorothea Tanning's future artistic career. The impressions she received at that time triggered a visual world that went to the sources of the Surrealist movement's original influences: the supernatural phantasmagoria of Gothic and Romantic literature.

Tanning met the artist Max Ernst in 1942 and they lived together until his death in 1976. She was somewhat younger than the already established surrealists when she had her breakthrough that same year through a group show with only female artists at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in New York. She painted in a dry realistic style. However, the motifs had an opposite character and showed a dream world where everyday life was transformed into something fantastic. Her lifelike realism gave the paintings a peculiar aura. It is as if the unreal could have taken place in them.

In the mid-1950s, her oeuvre changed. Surrealism remained, but the previously dry style became more diffuse, and the compositions were influenced by a unique combination of cubism and abstract expressionism. The painting Insomnias from 1957 is a crucial work in this developmental phase. It shows a cherub-like figure tearing itself free from a multitude of both figurative and abstract elements in a riot of colors of purple, yellow, lilac, and rust. The painting describes the state between wakefulness and sleep in which the inner and outer worlds coincide. What the painting tells us is determined by my own, personal associations.

The motif on this poster is a work of art in the Moderna Museet collection, Dorothea Tanning, Insomnias , 1957.

Item no.: MOM64

© Dorothea Tanning/BUS 2010