Dorothea Tanning

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.