The Truth About Comets

Dorothea Tanning

One of the most Christmassy/Wintery of all Surrealism’s images is Dorothea Tanning’s gorgeous The Truth About Comets. Painted in 1945, it features mermaid-tailed girls in a snowy landscape, one with their hand on the banister of a snow-covered staircase that also happens to be a tree. “Where does it lead?” we may ask or ponder. In some ways, its interpretation hints at the many doors of Tanning’s self-portrait Birthday (1942) with its mirror hall of doors as the artist stands on a precipice. Or maybe the two girls in the charged Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Night Music), her 1943 painting about confrontation. But no confrontation appears in this magical place, with shooting stars in the sky and Christmas comets providing the magic. There is no blood-red carpet here, only a blanket of snow.

Christmas had another meaning for Tanning. As I wrote in my previous Tanning dispatch (28 February 2022), at the age of 32 and pondering what to exhibit in Peggy Guggenheim's 31 Women exhibition to be held at the Art of the Century Gallery, she was visited by Guggenheim’s then-husband, Max Ernst. Tanning would recall how:

At first there was only that one picture, a self-portrait. It was a modest canvas by present-day standards. But it filled my New York studio, the apartment’s back room, as if it had always been there. For one thing, it was the room; I had been struck, one day, by a fascinating array of doors—hall, kitchen, bathroom, studio—crowded together, soliciting my attention with their antic planes, light, shadows, imminent openings and shuttings. From there it was an easy leap to a dream of countless doors. Perhaps in a way it was a talisman for the things that were happening, an iteration of quiet event, line densities wrought in a crystal paperweight of time where nothing was expected to appear except the finished canvas and, later, a few snowflakes, for the season was Christmas, 1942, and Max was my Christmas present.

Tanning and Ernst married in 1946, the year after The Truth About Comets, but they had already been a couple for some time. The artist, assemblage visionary, and filmmaker Joseph Cornell would mention the artwork in a letter to Tanning dated 29 December 1947. In the letter, Cornell mentions Tanning’s “little mermaid friends” of the painting and asks if “any of their sisters or cousins been showing up lately in any of your work?” He signs off his letter in a lovely, friendly manner, a reminder of this being the time of year when we should all be sending letters or cards (or even texts/WhatsApp messages in this day and age) to our friends in which we consider our creative works-in-progress, ponder the whereabouts of magical creatures, and hope that we can dine with our loved ones again soon.

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Dear Dorothea,

What a fairyland we find ourselves in! Never have we been piled higher with the topiary art and crystallized downfalls and drifts, as you probably know from the radio.
But even warmed I’m afraid that I’d still be an ungracious host to all this richesse. Dorothea, I’m in need of and await some flashings of your little mermaid friends who make such exquisite and poetic use of their native metamorphosed element. Have any of their sisters or cousins been showing up lately in any of your work?

What we are experiencing is an extravagant extension of an already white Christmas and this overflow of old fashioned winter, while really bad for the city, has aspects that I’ll probably have to enjoy in a happy afterglow. Reactions these days do not seem to be so sustained as heretofore and their intensities – while momentarily acute – short lived.

The aspect of our paysage reminds me of an object (new) that I think you’d like. It has lain in the attic for almost a year and a half and has no direct connection with the winter season (for inspiration and time of year that it was worked on, I mean). It is a box (very large) of snow owls in a rocky (beige) habi-tat (base), the upper part taken up by silvery crystalized branches – all against a singing blue(light) ground. It is too much on the Victorian side (at present) to be a bona fide “object”, and yet this is what I like about it. I think I’ll touch it up a bit still keep it pretty much the same – to enjoy in the company of people like yourself and our little comet friends. I am sure that the snow owls do not know – wise as they are – many secrets that have been kept from these latter.

I had looked forward to seeing you as had many others and was sorry to hear of the indisposition that kept you home. Hope things are O.K. with you out there and that your paintings shape up fast enough for a feast some day in the not too distant future.

Love to you and Max.
Joseph

December 29, 1947
* Green for Ondine