Dorothea
Tanning: artist from Galesburg
by Lynn McKeown
Many Galesburgers may be unaware that one of America's best
painters was born and raised in Galesburg. Art critic John Russell has called
Dorothea Tanning "one of the major artists of our [20th] century" and
"a distinctive and original American painter." Tanning, who now makes
her home in New York City, is also a talented writer who has published two
autobiographies, Birthday in 1986 and
Between Lives in 2001, as well as fiction and poetry. In the two
autobiographies she tells her life story, including formative experiences in
Galesburg and later experiences perhaps influenced by those formative years.
Tanning was born in Galesburg in 1910, the second daughter of
Andrew Peter George Tanning (born Andreas Thaning) and his wife Amanda. Andrew
had emigrated from Sweden at the age of seventeen. Once, telling her husband,
painter Max Ernst, about her feelings for her hometown, Tanning commented
"But you wouldn't know." He answered, "I think I do. The place
you had to leave. Everybody has one."
The young Dorothea was a bit unsettled, even as a youngster in
Galesburg. Her years growing up in the Ôteens and Ô20s were unsettled years in
America. She was rather often ill, but she was somewhat of a child prodigy who
skipped several grades (and ever after had difficulty with simple arithmetic as
a result). Her childhood was apparently mostly a happy one, and she tells a few
wryly amusing stories about growing up.
One hot summer day her father took her to a movie at the
Orpheum Theatre. It was a cowboy film with the popular Tom Mix, but she says
her father was more interested in the hero's horse Tony, while she was more
interested in the film's charming villain, "Lord Churlton,Ó with his lace
collar and velvet hat.
Dorothea had a job as a student clerk in the Galesburg Public
Library, where she found that the head librarian had marked with a red
"x" the books that she considered improper for young people. Dorothea
looked them up and read them – Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Hawthorne's Scarlet
Letter, and others then considered somewhat improper. She sometimes got
lost in a book when she should have been "reading the shelves"
(putting books in order) back in the stacks. Then the head librarian, "a resolute,
imposing woman, wearing pince-nez that trembled on her nose when she walked,
would sometimes flush me out herself, in a perfect towering rage."
Tanning's experience with books seems to have been an important
influence on her life, and she even includes a photo of the old Carnegie Public
Library building in both autobiographies as well as another book of her artwork
(labeled "scene of my corruption" in Birthday). "Over the years, the library became my haven,"
she says, "its treasures slyly challenging the voice of 'Art,' its sirens
singing and crying by turns, filling my eyes and ears with words, its weight
crushing my fatuous certitudes forever." And she laments the event
twenty-five years later when the library burned while her sisters "watched
with tear-stained faces. Thank God I wasn't there."
Though fascinated by books, Tanning, while still very young,
was determined to be an artist, and she once used her library earnings to rent
a Lake Bracken cabin for two weeks, a time she planned to devote to creating
"art." It didn't quite work. She was interrupted by well-meaning but
puzzled visitors and other distractions, and the hoped-for artistic production
didn't materialize.
Several years later, after a few years at Knox College (which,
unfortunately for her, did not have an applied art program at that time),
Tanning left her small town home, as many Americans were doing at the time. Her
first stop was not far away in Chicago, where she studied art for a time.
Family friend Carl Sandburg, who had been in the same company as Andrew Tanning
in the Spanish-American War, had cautioned her parents that art school would be
bad for her, thwarting her native ability, advice that she resented at the
time. But in fact she found the art school she attended in Chicago to be
unrewarding, and she quit after three weeks, finding better art education by
simply looking at the paintings on the walls of the Chicago Art Institute.
Then it was on to New York City, where she made a living doing
advertising illustrations while studying art and absorbing the art world of the
city. In 1936 she visited the Fantastic
Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which turned
out to be "the real explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels. Here is
the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY, signposts so imperious, so laden, so
seductive and, yes, so perverse that, like the insidious revelations of the
Galesburg Public Library, they would possess me utterly." She had found in
the European movement called "Surrealism" the inspiration for her own
artistic creativity.
Tanning had wanted to live in Paris since the age of seven, and
in 1939, with very little money, she set off for that artistic promised land.
Unfortunately, she found a Paris bracing for war. After a short stay she had to
make a quick escape to relatives in Stockholm and then back to New York.
A few years later, in New York, came what was unquestionably
one of the momentous experiences of her life, the meeting with Max Ernst. The
German painter was in exile from his native country, where the Nazis ranked his
work as "degenerate art." (It was, of course, the Nazis who were
degenerate, as was to become evident soon.) Born in 1891, Ernst had been
wounded while serving with the German Army in World War One, and after the war
he had begun to make a name for himself in Europe as one of the group
of-artists associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements. After being
imprisoned in several prison camps in Nazi-controlled France, he made his
escape to Spain and then America. By 1942, when he met Tanning, he was
recognized as a painter of genius.
As Tanning tells it, she met Ernst at a party in 1942, and then
shortly afterward he appeared at her door one day to consider her paintings for
inclusion in an exhibit of women artists. He looked at her artwork, realized
she was a chess player, and suggested a game. The next day he returned for
another game – and the next day another. A week after the first visit, he
moved in. Thus began a relationship that lasted till Ernst's death in 1976
(They were married in 1946) and that apparently was a happy one for both of
them.
Much of Birthday is
the story of Tanning's life with Max Ernst, a quiet, gentle man who painted
iconoclastic, often violent pictures, but who seems to have been a considerate
if somewhat aloof husband. From New York City they moved to Sedona, Arizona,
then to Paris, back and forth between Europe and America, and finally settled
in the south of France, living for many years in a house that Tanning designed.
During these years, they lived lives of dedicated artists, in which they were a
bit apart from the rest of the world, though they did encounter it in strange
ways at times.
Neither Tanning nor Ernst seem to have had much interest in
politics or social causes, but one semi-political occasion, however, brought
Tanning to an awareness of her old home in Galesburg. While living in Paris,
they were invited to a sort of rally that was supposed to have something to do
with ballet. It turned out to be a public poetry reading by leftist
intellectual Louis Aragon, and Dorothea, to her amazement, was seated on the
front row next to the leader of the Communist Party in France. She found the
experience "grotesque" as photographers snapped pictures, and she
thought: "Was it really me, Dottie Tanning from Galesburg, the tender
romantic, her fabric shot through with dreams of unearthly splendor...?"
I have no expertise whatsoever to talk about the artwork of
Dorothea Tanning. It is obviously a sort of rebellion against the conventional,
early Twentieth Century Middle America of her younger years. In an
"Afterword" she wrote for a book of her artwork, Dorothea Tanning, published in 1995, she says that her parents'
lives exemplified "piety, conformity and self-reliance," and that of those
qualities, she had kept only the last. Of course, times have changed since her
days in Galesburg, or even the middle years of the century when she produced
most of her art. Now, what may have been shocking has become passŽ. There is a
vibrancy, originality and offbeat humor in her paintings, however, that is
appealing, and I wonder if it won't stand the test of time. (She also created
unusual and amusing cloth sculptures of human forms morphing into furniture
– or are they furniture morphing into humans?)
I'm a little more able to evaluate Tanning's ability as a
writer, and I find her two autobiographies engrossing, with a masterful use of
language. This is a woman of talent with the pen (word processor?) as well as
the paintbrush. Birthday is a kind of
prose poem telling her life story as a talented artist and the wife of another
talented artist. Between Lives is a
sort of expanded version of the previous book with many of the same stories but
a bit more down-to-earth. The latter book has more stories of Tanning's
experiences with famous individuals in the world of the arts (like the time she
visited Picasso and he made her a gift of the last rose in his garden). Both
books are worth reading for anyone interested in 20th Century art. According to
a recent interview in the New Yorker,
Tanning has given up painting to concentrate on poetry.
It is interesting to see how, in her books, Tanning returns to
her feeling toward her hometown. She had a very different sort of life than if
she had stayed in small-town Illinois. But Galesburg pops up from time to
time in her writing. In the ÒAfterwordÓ she wrote for her 1995 collection of
her artwork, there are many stories and pictures (including one of her father
with Carl Sandburg) reflecting her life in Galesburg. Perhaps a bit of
small-town Dottie Tanning and Galesburg were always present in the Dorothea
Tanning who traveled widely in the cosmopolitan world of Twentieth Century art
and created artwork of great originality.
3/13/08