Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World - Hardcover

by Alyce Mahon (Author)

This study overhauls canonical accounts of Surrealism, demonstrating how one woman artist expanded its activity and expression in bold new ways for the modern age

Born on the day of a hurricane in Galesburg, Illinois, Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) would become a figure at the very heart of the avant-garde, among a close circle of contemporaries including Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Lee Miller and Man Ray. Her art and philosophical ideas reveal her transformative impact on post-war Surrealism, and her life story reveals how she skilfully navigated her role as a woman artist on the international stage. Alyce Mahon maps Tanning's extraordinary seventy-year career--from Chicago and Arizona to Paris and Seillans, through to her final years in New York--and traces how these landscapes were reshaped into kaleidoscopic imagined worlds in her paintings, sculptures and writings.

Author Biography

Alyce Mahon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968; Eroticism and Art; The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde, and numerous essays on Surrealism and the international avant-garde.