Chloe Wyma on Dorothea Tanning
The present right here by Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), “Doesn’t the Paint Say It All?,” was being billed by Kasmin as “essentially the most complete solo presentation of her work for US audiences in a long time.” It was, nevertheless, under no circumstances a retrospective. Absent have been the romantic costume and set designs Tanning confected for George Balanchine’s ballets between 1945 and 1953; her underknown, fantastically perverse biomorphic tender sculptures from the mid- to late Sixties; and, maybe most conspicuously, her tightly labored mythopoeic work of the Nineteen Forties, essentially the most well-known examples of which—together with the preternatural self-portrait Birthday, 1942, and the girlhood purgatory of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night time Music), 1943—have turn into icons of Surrealist disturbia unearthed from the feminine unconscious. As a substitute, the items on view on this exhibition—from the massive baroque canvases of the Fifties, with their spectral fragments of anatomical imagery submerged in fields of summary painterly effluvia, to the voluptuous restored figuration of the Seventies and ’80s—felt comparatively underdetermined and immune to interpretation. Tanning made rattling certain of that.
Painted the yr after her associate Max Ernst’s loss of life, Portrait de famille (Household Portrait), 1977, agglutinates three headless nudes right into a Rubenesque mass of pink pores and skin, their torqued our bodies modeled with a sort of fetishistic old-masterish chiaroscuro. Tucked beneath a rippling thigh is the face of a shaggy canine, tentatively rising from the vaporous blue-green ambiance pillowing the entwined throuple. The swooning extra of flesh and ether tease thematic topoi—intercourse, the female, the physique—all summarily rejected by Tanning herself. She disdained erotic readings of her work (“the unhappy little procession of analyzers, trudging towards the altar of libido . . .”) as a lot as she did the feminist scholarship that introduced a brand new viewers to her artwork on the flip of the millennium. “The Motion washes over me,” the artist wrote in 2001, with a sure crotchety hauteur, “[like] an unwary beachcomber; it pulls, drags, coerces, calls for my solidarity, my admission of sisterhood. Looming giant in my nook is the phenomenon of Ladies Painters. . . . [My] photos don’t have any place in our organic morass, our mouse destiny. As a substitute they’re pirate maps. Diagrams for mutiny.”
The seafaring metaphors resonate in Pour Gustave l’adoré (For the Adored Gustave), 1974, by which a viridescent type resembling a mermaid’s tail slides into view from abyssal darkness. In line with the art-historical literature attending the work, the title is a punning homage to nineteenth-century artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, whose canvas Les océanides (naiades de la mer) (The Oceanids [Naiads of the Sea]), ca. 1860, Tanning would purchase in 2001. But her enigmatic image couldn’t be temperamentally farther from the pompier lubriciousness of Doré’s tableau, with its bevy of nubile bipedal nymphs splashing and sunbathing round a sure Prometheus. Comply with the tail of Tanning’s Melusine into the shadows and it joins with a groin coated in darkish pubic hair, calling to thoughts a portray by one other Gustave—Courbet’s L’origine du monde (The Origin of the World), 1866. The form insinuates a genuflecting human leg vanishing within the murk. This amphibious determine—slippery and self-othering, a mutant and a mutineer towards organic and categorical determinacy—appears to have been cathected with profound significance for the artist, who made two different practically an identical variations of this picture, in numerous sizes, in 1966 and 1982.
In 1987, Tanning, haunted by a replica of a portray of a flower area seen in an obscure artist’s catalogue a long time prior, painted On Avalon. Her largest-ever canvas, it calls to thoughts Matisse’s La danse (The Dance), 1910, if executed by an aged, practically blind Monet_. _Naked figures writhe in a crypto-druidic revel, their heads efflorescing into gyres of white brushwork paying homage to monumental chrysanthemums or Catherine wheels exploding within the forest. They “might have been flowers,” Tanning wrote, “but in addition novas, tears, omens, God is aware of what, contending or conniving with our personal ancestral form in a spot I’d give something to know.” Does the paint actually “say all of it,” because the exhibition’s title assures us? What, then, is it telling us? If Tanning’s photos are treasure maps, they forsake the indexical closure of “X marks the spot” for shipwrecked worlds of which means that glimmer—seductive and irretrievable—from oceanic depths.
— Chloe Wyma
