Opening the Doors on Dorothea Tanning at the Tate

If surrealist art is all about exploring the subconscious, well then, Dorothea Tanning seems to have had quite a lot of subconscious to explore.

An exhibition looking back on her 70-year career at Tate Modern in London reveals an artist who came late to surrealism but who probably created more memorable and disturbing images than any other of the rare women who were able to gain a foothold in what was a rather male-dominated movement.

Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, a small town in Illinois, where, she said, "nothing happened but the wallpaper." She went to Chicago and New York in search of a career as an artist and came across surrealism in a New York exhibition in 1936. Just before World War II she travelled to Paris, but the outbreak of war forced her back across the Atlantic. In 1942, she met the German surrealist artist, Max Ernst, her future husband, who saw this picture on her easel on their first encounter. Ernst suggested the title, Birthday, to mark her birth as a surrealist in her own right.

How many doors are in there? A lot. The doors are the portals to the subconscious; they represent choice and possibility, but they can lock up fears, and desires too. Her skirt appears a living thing in its own right; a seaweed- or mistletoe-like plant containing tiny human forms. And then there's the winged creature on the floor, recalling in some strange way the demon crouching on the sleeping woman in Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare, surely a forerunner of so many surrealist images. Or did she find a gargoyle-inspired being like this lurking in some Northern Renaissance painting?

You're possibly already familiar with one of Tanning's best-known works, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, from 1943, which is part of the Tate's own collection. Two young female figures, one seemingly a doll, stand on a landing in front of a series of numbered doors, one of which is slightly ajar to reveal an orange light. A giant sunflower, some of its petals torn off, lies on the blood-red carpet at the top of the stairs....

Young girls and flowers had been elements of Tanning's work for some years, as in 1941's The Magic Flower Game, in which clothes and balls of wool or thread transform themselves into blooms. The sky, and the fireplace, through which a cat appears to be escaping, evoke Magritte.

We've got one more of these typically surrealist images, very precisely painted in a similar fashion to Magritte or Dalí, to show you: The Guest Room from the start of the 1950s. A pubescent girl stands at the open double door to a bedroom, where another girl lies asleep clutching a doll. There are two mysterious hooded figures, one wearing some snazzy cowboy boots. And a lot of broken eggs. It's all very enigmatic.

From here on, Tanning was to change her painting style radically several times, but the surrealism remained part of her art. One very unsettling picture from 1954 is Family Portrait, with its overdimensional father figure too big to stay in the frame, a diminutive mother and, a not infrequent image in the artist's work, a sharply folded linen tablecloth. "The grid surely proved that order prevailed in this house," Tanning said.

From all this, you might deduce that Tanning had an unhappy childhood, but no, at least not the way she tells it in a film made in the late 1970s, after Ernst's death, that can be seen at the end of the show.

Throughout her career, those doors remained an integral part of her work. In 1984's Door 84, Tanning put part of a real door, complete with handles, in the middle of her canvas, with the figures on either side of it pushing hard against it. It's a picture that's startling in its size and colour as well as concept.

Door 84 has a lot of energy and ingenuity about it, but in general we found the more loosely painted pictures of Tanning's later years much less compelling than the earlier work. In the 1960s, Tanning also latched on to the Pop-Art development of soft sculpture, and in Étreinte (Embrace), a faceless, furry, gorilla-like creature has a pink woman's body in its grip.

But the most bizarre, perhaps the most surreal artwork in the entire show is an installation. Earlier on in the exhibition, in the 1942 painting Children's Games, two small girls rip away wallpaper in a room to reveal body parts beneath. Thirty years on, in Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202, the soft-sculpted bodies are coming through the walls!

The room number comes from a song from Tanning's childhood called In Room 202, in which "the walls keep talkin' to you." And the creatures are coming down the chimney too, and have taken over the chair and the table. Luckily, the door's still open. But you won't be booking the Hôtel du Pavot on your next city break....

We enjoyed this exhibition more than we were expecting to, or perhaps more than we were subconsciously fearing. Tanning, who died only in 2012 at the age of 101, turns out to have been one of the most fun of the surrealists and the creator of a fair few memorable pictures. And a lot easier to like than her husband, Max Ernst. Sorry, Max.

Practicalities

Dorothea Tanning is on at Tate Modern on Bankside in London until June 9. Opening hours are daily from 1000 to 1800, extended to 2200 on Fridays and Saturdays. Full-price tickets are £13, or £11 if booked in advance, which you can do online here. Blackfriars on the Thameslink cross-London rail line and Southwark on the Jubilee Line Tube are the nearest stations to Tate Modern.   

Also on at Tate Modern

The shimmering colour of the south of France is at the heart of the Pierre Bonnard show, which runs until May 6. It's an exhibition that only really takes off halfway through, we felt. And for another very different experience, Magic Realism, a free show on figurative art in 1920s Germany, can be seen until July 14.

Images

Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, 1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art. © DACS, 2019
Dorothea Tanning, The Magic Flower Game, 1941, Private collection, South Dakota. © DACS, 2019
Dorothea Tanning, The Guest Room, 1950-52, Private collection, courtesy Malingue SA, Paris
Dorothea Tanning, Family Portrait, 1954, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais © DACS, 2019
Dorothea Tanning, Door 84, 1984, The Destina Foundation, New York
Dorothea Tanning, Étreinte, 1969, The Destina Foundation, New York in front of Dorothea Tanning, Même les jeunes filles, 1966, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Dorothea Tanning, Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202, 1970-1973, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Philippe Migeat © DACS, 2019