The artist Dorothea Tanning worked as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer with an eventful seven decade career. Primarily a self taught artist, Tanning is frequently situated in the Surrealist movement due to her figurative paintings depicting dreamy and hallucinogenic representations. Despite this, Tanning’s artistic style was individual to her own particular tastes. Influenced by Gothic and Romantic novels that she read as a child, these sensationalist and affective narratives would go on to inform her artistic style. Many of her paintings are frequently composed of ambiguous creature-like forms emerging from a fog which she called her “insomnia” paintings. She was continuously fascinated by the human form, with a particular interest in the feminine condition, at a time in American culture when the form was not a popular subject. Tanning states, “I don’t see why one shouldn’t be absolutely fascinated with the human form, there are so many reasons to be. Besides, we are living in human bodies, we go through life in this world envelope. Why not acknowledge that and try to say something about it? So what I try to say about it is transformation.” 

This original drawing offers two figures, one dark and one light, in a moment of ambiguous embrace. With distorted limbs spread long and wide, the two forms hold tight to one another. The dark figure is wearing a black dress and heels, towering over the lighter figure. The lighter figure appears to be nude, and bends fully backward in a twisting motion, succumbing to the dark figure. Both have limbs that resemble insects and their movements could be perceived as either a romantic dance or an overbearing struggle—or perhaps both simultaneously. There are quick marks of swirls all around the figures that indicate movement. Is the embrace a vampiric kiss of death? The two are intertwined in an intimate embrace but of what kind we cannot say. This work reflects the artist’s lifelong study of the passionate interplay of figures. Tanning frequently combines two figures in her paintings and drawings, sometimes creating her own hybrid species, Intriguingly, imposed on top of the figures is a wide colorful rainbow.

Born to Swedish immigrant parents, Tanning was raised in suburban Illinois. She quit college to pursue a career as an artist, moving to New York City in 1935 to work as a commercial artist while continuing her own painting practice. In 1936 she visited the Museum of Modern Art’s famous Surrealist exhibit Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism and it forever changed her artmaking. She met the artist Max Ernst in 1942 and they were married in 1946. Tanning received two solo exhibits at the Julien Levy gallery in 1944 and in 1948, where she was introduced to a wider number of Surrealist artists. With Ernst, she lived in New York City and Sedona, Arizona, and later the South of France. After Ernst’s death in 1976 she returned to New York City and continued to paint. By the 1990s, Tanning had turned her artistic attention to writing and poetry and she published widely in respected journals until her death at the age of 101 in 2012. Her works include two memoirs Birthday (1986) and Between Lives (2001). In 1997 the Dorothea Tanning Foundation was established. Her work has been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; The Menil Collection, Houston; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.