Portrait of Space
"You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you."
Dorothea Tanning has been referred to as ‘an archaeologist of the human psyche’ who ‘carefully removes debris from areas within her unconscious, catalogs [sic] the shards of memory, fantasy, and prophecy, and then displays them in paintings that are alarmingly beautiful.’ As Tanning defiantly stated in a 1990 interview,
Women artists. There is no such thing—or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as “man artist” or “elephant artist.” You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.
In Breton’s 1937 tome, L’Amour Fou (Mad Love), his evocations, in the words of Alice Mahon, ‘allow Breton to simultaneously portray the male artist as valiant lover and explorer and the female as perpetually elusive’. Breton’s rendition of the male adventurer and the subdued female needing rescuing is problematic for many reasons, notably when it is increasingly (and universally) recognised how fearless, daring, and resourceful women associated with the movement were in both their art and lives. Leonor Fini is a prime example of a woman artist refusing to relinquish her power. Instead, this self-styled ‘Sphinx of Surrealism’ inverted the erotic appeal of the sphinx, transforming it from a sexually-objectified figure of male desire to one of empowered female sexuality, once commenting:
I wanted to be like the sphinx I saw in the garden of Miramar Castle in Trieste. I wanted to think like it, to be strong and eternal, to be a living sphinx. Later, I felt that the combination of half-animal, half-human was the ideal state. I identified with the hybrid. The sphinx is a living being who dominates men in a calm way and has pity for them. But it can also be dangerous.
Fini’s autonomous art was unyielding. She did not subscribe to Breton’s declaration in his novel Nadja (1928) that ‘the problem of woman is the most wonderful and disturbing problem there is in the world’, and despised his inherent misogyny. To Fini, no such ‘problem’ existed. She lived a life of unashamed sexuality evidenced in her art, painting sphinxes that were self-governing, non-acquiescent, seductive and, often, predatory. To quote Mahon:
Intrinsic to the surrealists’ stance on the sphinx as a poetic representation was a gendered view of desire, of course. Paradoxically, woman was famed as a peculiarly initiatory and healing power on the one hand and as a fatal seductress on the other.
Fini’s determinism and strident independence may have inspired male artists, and, on occasion, she may have been an intermittent, reluctant muse. Yet, she never fell prey to the label. Raised in an educated, wealthy household by her mother and Grandparents, she was encouraged in her artistic pursuits and never felt the need to rebel in the traditional sense. Other women associated with Surrealism had a unique styles of rebellion, perfectly encapsulated by Leonora Carrington’s statement, ‘I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist’. Lee Miller, meanwhile, had her second liberation post-Surrealism and before her career as a renowned documentary and war photographer, when a solo car journey into the Egyptian desert resulted in some of the most striking photography of her career.
In 1934, after separating from Man Ray and abandoning her artistic vocation, Miller married the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eluoi Bey. The marriage was short-lived — it was apparent they were opposing personalities. Miller remained indifferent and dismayed by Eluoi Bey's lifestyle and routine, which primarily consisted of orchestrating his large rota of domestic staff or indulging in his favourite sporting pastimes, and decided to make a change. One day, likely in a bid to escape a lifestyle that never felt familiar and suited, she grabbed her camera and drove into the Egyptian desert to regain a sense of herself, her creativity, and the exciting, vibrant life she once knew.
1937’s Portrait of Space alludes to her Surrealist past and, as the title implies, is a merging of genres and themes. The slashed canopy is an eye, the floating clouds are lips, and the landscape is a person — perhaps a body. Maybe her body. It may appear to be a familiar Surrealist scene, but the image is unique and all her own.
Georgiana M. M. Colville has considered this period in Miller’s life and how she ‘found an inner freedom in photographing the desert landscape’, referring to how ‘Carolyn Burke reads “a latent sexual energy” into Miller’s Egyptian work at a time when, according to her letters, she longed for her absent lover’. The photographs she produced hint at Dadaism through their abstraction, as she highlights and reflects light to create a series of geometric shapes that imply loneliness, longing, and escape.
To quote from the Lee Miller archive:
The enigmatic Portrait of Space allows the viewer to decide where their focus lies and what is happening. The cloud behind the frame, reminiscent in shape of a bird, is possibly alluding to how Lee felt at the time. Loving the adventure of the desert yet finding the expectations of the ex-patriot society stifling, she felt a longing to escape. In Egypt Lee was far from the buzzing art movement she had been a part of in Paris.
Miller returned to Paris in 1937 and reconnected with Roland Penrose. They married in 1947, the same year her divorce from Eluoi Bey was finalised.
Desire, especially for women, is not the romantic interludes we see in movies, but often something untoward. Desire is its own beast — dark, perverse, insane, uncomfortable, wretched. ‘Little Girls’ are framed to be sweet little creatures of innocence, incapable of wretchedness or evil when girlhood is a strange and perverse experience. Minds wander into places of darkness as bodies change, develop, and hormones rage. Women are frequently told to quell their desires, while emotions are labelled as hysterical, evil, to be feared.
Tanning was not afraid to go to these darker places. In her 1943 short story Bind Date she wrote, ‘I am one vast fiery wound, closed and healed with a hardness impossible to the untouched. There is only a marvellous kind of synaesthesic awareness that the wallpaper is singing to me. And this is the song of the wallpaper.’ She concludes the story with the voice saying,
Today you have been born out of abysmal sorry and knowledge, out of symbols, destructions, warnings, wounds, pestilence, instruments sacred and obscene, spasms, defilements; out of hates and holocausts, guts and gothic grandeurs, frenzy, crimes, visions, scorpions, secretions, love and the devil.
Tanning spent her later life in Sedona. The sprawling Arizona landscape of fertile earth and vast expansive landscapes provided a rich fertile ground for the self-exploration of art and psyche. This area of northern Arizona has three common species of scorpions. In the shadows and spaces is where sexuality in all its dark crevasses looms, and this is where Tanning’s art — like so much art by women — remains so incredibly affecting. As Fini said, “I am the snake that bites its own tail. I am the Moon, Astarte, metaphysically a virgin, an amazon.”
Portrait of Space
Fascinating. Thank you.
Wonderful x