December is here, and I am considering ways to incorporate the festive season into this newsletter. Various thoughts and feelings will appear in subsequent dispatches, but for now my mind keeps returning to something I wrote in February 2022 - a piece about Dorothea Tanning - because it seems and feels like an appropriate place to start.
When Tanning was 32 and pondering what to exhibit in Peggy Guggenheim's groundbreaking 31 Women exhibition at her Art of the Century Gallery, her lover, the artist Max Ernst (whom she married in 1946), visited Tanning in her New York studio. In the room stood Tanning’s Birthday (1942), her well-known self-portrait and the work she would later choose to exhibit. As you can see, the piece depicts Tanning on a precipice, countless doors and their endless possibilities opening (some may say closing?) before her. As she would later reminisce:
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.
It’s such a hopeful and seasonally magical paragraph, I think. That feeling of not being entirely sure what lies ahead, yet anything - and everything - is possible.
Tanning’s 1969 soft sculpture Xmas may not be typically festive, but it’s a gorgeously charged erotic object from the artist we often gaze towards for sexually surreal soft furnishings. The work, made of fabric, wool, and metal, takes on various forms depending on your angle: it’s a nude woman kneeling, her arms wrapped around her head. Then again, it could be two figures entwined. When she was asked to explain the meaning of Xmas (no pun intended), Tanning replied (deliciously, naughtily), “X marks the spot.”
Having turned to soft fabric sculptures in the mid-1960s, in 1969 Tanning made not only Xmas, but De quel amour (By What Love) (1969), and Etreinte (1969). Her 1970 piece Emma (1970) was a reference to Emma Bovary, the female protagonist in Gustave Flaubert’s notorious Madame Bovary (1856) - ‘a woman who escapes the boredom of married life through literature and clandestine affairs’ - albeit glimpsed through exposed pink flesh and dishevelled lace skirt. We can consider it as Tanning’s emphasis on softness, warmth, and touch in a brutal, cold, world.
In a 1974 interview, Tanning was asked by the French writer, poet, and art critic Alain Jouffroy the following question: ‘Your sculptures – Ouvre-toi, for instance – are fragile on purpose, bound to decay. Like the human body. Are you detached from the notion of “duration,” from the “survival of your work? Or do you feel compelled to challenge the underlying urge to preserve that exists in art?’
Tanning, as was her way, responded perfectly:
‘These sculptures do show such a detachment. They will, in effect, last about as long as a human life – the life of someone “delicate.” But it isn’t a challenge, even though I find that being obsessed with the durability of a work doesn't appeal to me. I am often told, “What a pity your sculptures aren't more solid.” They might as well say “dead,” or “paralyzed.” No, I’m sorry for them that it should have happened that way. But it did. When you fall in love you don’t ask the beloved, “How long are you going to live?”’
Tanning revised similar sentiments almost twenty years later when discussing 1970’s Canapé en temps de pluie (Rainy-Day Canapé), an erotic chaise made of tweed, upholstered wood sofa, wool, Ping-Pong balls, and cardboard. Writing for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Birthday and Beyond - the museum’s retrospective of her work - she said:
‘This terribly non-mainstream piece was, more than anything, a challenge to myself, a bet that I made with myself, and only me, that I would give real physical life to a bunch of tweeds and stuffing. Now, when you look at its triumphant? paroxysmic? despairing? Physicality you are not quite sure that materials are only tools, that the inert is the inert, that life is something else. But one thing you know: that like you and me and everyone else, this Rainy-Day Canapé will not live for centuries. But how could we care?’
Another fantastic meditation on one of my favourite women surrealists! Tanning's soft sculptures thrill and inspire me and I love that she was comfortable with the idea of them degrading over time. I didn't know the Xmas one, but I remember spending ages walking round and round Étreinte in the Tate exhibition a while ago. Amazing.