DARING DOROTHEA TANNING

Exploring the Art of Dorothea Tanning

 "Am I a surrealist? Must we artists bow our heads and accept a label without which we do not exist? The ideas of surrealism are still very much with me. But I have no label except artist."

Dorothea was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois. She was a self-taught artist and only briefly studied painting in Chicago while haunting the Art Institute where she learned what painting was.  She moved to New York City in 1941 and met the most important influence in her life, the artist and painter Max Ernst. He came to visit her studio to look at one of her paintings but stayed to play a game of chess. They had 34 happy years together. Early in their relationship they decide to move out of the United States and lived in France, where she continued to paint her enigmatic versions of life: on the inside looking out. 

 Dorothea found herself facing a solitary future when Max died on April 1, 1976. 

She was quoted as having said after Max's death, " I was a loner, am a loner, good Lord, it is the only way I can imagine working. When I hooked up with Max, he was clearly the only person I needed, and I can assure you, we never, never talked about art. Never."

 Soon her paint tubes, brushes, and canvases began calling out to her, telling her to go back home to the United States where she remained for the rest of her life.

Dorothea's early paintings were precisely figurative renderings of dream-like situations. In her youth, Dorothea read many gothic, romantic novels in her hometown of Galesburg. These fantastical stories filled with imagery of the imaginary, heavily influenced her style and subject matter for years to come.  Like most Surrealist painters, she was meticulous in her attention to details, building layers of paint with carefully muted brushstrokes.  She painted depictions of unreal scenes, some of which combined erotic subjects with enigmatic symbols and desolate space. While in France, her work radically changed as her paintings took on a less erotic approach and her images became increasingly fragmented and pragmatic.

She explains her work with this quote, " Around 1955, my canvases literally splintered...I broke the mirror, you might say."

Her artwork has been exhibited in numerous one-person shows in France, Sweden, and London as well as the United States. In 1992,  The New York Library had a showing of her prints and in 2000, The Philadelphia Art Museum held an exhibition of her work. 

  After returning to the United States, Dorothea found her voice and began writing poetry and short stories, which were widely published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review.

In an interview for Salon.com and asked, "So what have you tried to communicate as an artist?

She replied, "I'd be satisfied in suggesting that there is more than meets the eye."

In 1997, The Dorothea Tanning Foundation was established with the purpose of preserving the artist's legacy while fostering a broader, public understanding of the artist's art, writing, and poetry. They manage and distribute the art and asset of Dorothea for philanthropic purposes.

"The diversity pf experience and attitude on the part of women artists active in Surrealism has proved both an obstacle and a challenge. In the end, I came to view such diversity as a tribute to these women, an attribution to their strength and a mark of their commitment to a form of creative expression in which personal reality dominates".

 Dorethea died in her home in New York City on January 31, 2012. She was 101 years old. She had just published her second collection of poems called, "Coming To That".

ALL HALLOWS EVE

by Dorothe Tanning

Be perfect, make it otherwise. 

Yesterday is torn in shreds.

Lightnings thousand sulfur eyes

Rip apart the breathing beds.

Her bones crack and pulverize.

Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Countless overwrought housewives,

Minds unraveling like threads,

Try lipstick shades to tranquilize

Fears of age and general dreads.

Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,

Don't take faucets for fountainheads.

Drink tasty antidotes.  Otherwise

You and the werewolf: Newlyweds.

Now it is your turn to immerse yourself in the style of Dorothea Tanning and create your own Surrealist art piece! This is the first artist I have showcased that did not have a tragic life circumstance that influenced her artistic style!! Her life is as described as..."She breathed words as well as air and looked at her paintings in amazement"!

Here is my Dorothea Tanning Creations:

Digital art created from Gecko Galz Free Images and DreamPrint Fusion Digital Kit Daydream Escapes

REVOLTIONARY RENE MAGRITTE

To continue in our Surrealist Masterclass, we will learn about the amazing artist, 

Rene Magritte

 A Belgian surrealist painter, Rene Magritte was renowned for his witty, thought-provoking paintings which took ordinary objects in unexpected contexts which challenged the viewers perception of reality. His work provoked questions about the nature of reality and representation.  He began drawing lesson at age 10 at the royal academy of Fine Art in Brussels. During this time his mother committed suicide by drowning. Her body was not discovered until 16 days later. Magritte was present at the time they retrieved her body from the water. When her body was discovered, her dress was covering her face. This image has been repeated in several of Magritte's paintings where the people he painted have cloth obscuring their faces. Many of Magritte's paintings have an alluring, almost fantastic appeal with a subject matter of images with gruesome detail.

 

The use of objects as other than what they seem typifies his work which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, Ceci n'est nas une pipe..."this is not a pipe," which seems a contradiction but actually is true: the painting in not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. When asked about this image Magritte said, "Of course this is not a pipe---just try to fill it with of tobacco."

In 1922-23, Magritte worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory and he was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full time. In 1927m he held his first solo exhibition in Brussels. it was poorly reviewed.

 Depressed by his failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with Anton Benton and became involved in a Surrealist group.  An illusionistic, dream-like quality is characteristic of Magritte's version of Surrealism. he became a leading member of the group and remained in Paris for 3 years. In 1929, he was pit under contract at the Goeman's Gallery in Paris.

   

Magritte married Georgette Berger in June 1922. Childhood sweethearts, he first met Georgette when she was 13 and he was 15. They met again in Brussels 7 years later when Georgette, who also studied art, became his model, his muse, and his wife. He was madly in love with her until 1936, when Magritte's marriage became troubled. He met a young performance artist, Sheila Lege, and began a short-lived affair with her. He arranged for his friend, Paul Colinet, to entertain and distract Georgette, but this led to an affair between Georgette and Paul. Sadly, they separated and did not reconcile until 1940 and then lived happily together until the day Magritte died. She lived on after him for 10 more years before she passed away.

In 1945, Magritte joined the Belgium Communist party. his political beliefs distinguished him form many of his surrealists pers. Magritte's support for the communist party tied him neatly to his love for the ubiquitous bowler hat which became s constant fixture of his wardrobe. The hat made him appear just like his fellow comrades, having the opposite effect of say, Salvador Dali's moustache! The hat also became a permanent fixture in his artwork as well.

Unlike many of his surrealist peers, Magritte didn't rely on automatic techniques or dreamlike abstraction. Instead, he applied precision of a realist painter to surreal ideas, creatin poetic puzzles that tease the boundaries between illusion and reality. His work is not simply what is seen, but about how it is seen. Pipes that are not pipes, men with obscured faces, skies inside eyes---his images remain ss enigmatic today as they were when first unveiled. You can see the recurring symbols, sly contradictions and quite provocations that define Magritte's unique legacy.

He once said, "It is irrelevant of the scene behind the easel differed from what was depicted upon it, but the main thing was to eliminate the difference between a view seen from outside and from inside a room."

His use of ordinary objects in unfamiliar spaces in unfamiliar spaces is joined to his desire to create poetic imagery. He called painting as, "the art of putting colors side by side in such a way that their real aspect is effaced, so that familiar objects ----the sky people, trees, mountains, furniture, the stars, solid structures, graffiti----became united in a single poetically disciplined image. The poetry pf this image dispenses with any symbolic significance, old or new.

As Curator Catlin Haskell wrote of Magritte's work: Magritte more than any other artist of the past century, made it his project to subvert our faith in visual similitude. As rapidly improving technology simplifies our ability to realistically distort images, it's more important than ever to consider what  is a pipe and what's not."

Magritte described his paintings as "visible images which conceal nothing, they evoke mystery and indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, "What does it mean? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967, age 68. and was buried in Schaerbeek Cemetery, Evere, Brussels.

Here are my Magritte Creations!

Sorry for the delay in posting the challenge! I had another loss in my family and so the past few weeks I have been traveling back and forth involved in family matters! I am back now and hopefully no more delays! Thank you for patiently waiting for me! 

Can't wait to see your own Magritte creations!

Digital art created from DreamPrintFusion Digital Kits Quirky People and Spring Quirky People and images from Pixabay