detours || dorothea tanning

Jean Stein

Dorothea TanningAuthor(s): Ann TemkinSource: Grand Street, No. 72, Detours (Autumn, 2003), pp. 137-139Published by: Jean SteinStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25008704 .

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Dorothea Tanning

In the late 196os, Dorothea Tanning set aside her paintbrushes and took up scis

sors and her sewing machine. The scissors were heavy shears, sharp enough to

penetrate the luxurious tweeds she favored. The sewing machine was a portable

Singer that had accompanied her from Galesburg, Illinois, to Manhattan, to

Sedona, Arizona, and across the Atlantic to France. For the seamstress, the

machine made stylish dress affordable. For the sculptor, it offered not conven

ience but a challenge: stitched inside out, like dresses, the final forms were

apparent to the artist only after they left the machine.

Tanning's fabrics were acquired on expeditions to the Marche Saint-Pierre,

an emporium near the Sacre-Cceur in Paris. Along with the tweed came pink

cottons, white wools, and even fake fur-all carried back to Seillans, the hilltop

village in the south of France to which Tanning and her husband, Max Ernst,

had moved in 1964. Nearby were flocks of sheep, which obligingly produced

plenty of wool for shearing each spring. Tanning's next-door neighbor carded

the wool in the backyard, providing her with an ongoing supply of stuffing.

Beyond that there were simple things: Ping-Pong balls (the vertebrae of Reclining

Nude), a plastic funnel (Pincushion to Serve as Fetish), a pocket handkerchief (Xmas).

A friend contributed a loveseat and chair, which were summarily swallowed

into tweed (Rainy Day Canape; Revelation or The End of the Month). One day the

paneled kitchen door was sacrificed to art (Ouvre-toi).

An epiphany had announced the onset of the sculptures. Attending a

concert in 1969 at the Maison de la Radio in Paris,Tanning heard Karlheinz

Stockhausen conduct his own composition Hymnen. In her autobiography,

Tanning writes, "Spinning among the unearthly sounds of Hymnen were the

earthy, even organic shapes that I would make, had to make, out of cloth

and wood; I saw them so clearly, living materials becoming living sculptures,

their life span something like ours."

In an intensive response to this vision, Tanning made almost twenty individ

ual fabric figures-soft, strong creatures whose ambiguous anatomies and

faceless heads somehow add to their life force. Full of an eroticism that can be

read as both pleasure and pain, they tumble and sprawl, linger and twist,

oblivious to past or future events. In the ensemble titled Hotel du Pavot, Chambre

202, created for Tanning's 1974 retrospective at the Centre National d'Art

Contemporain in Paris, a shabby room with dated wallpaper and wainscoting is

peopled by tweed figures burgeoning out of the fireplace and furniture. Above

137



= ~~~~~~~~~~~~~L EFT: Unt itled, 1963 .

.s..'' 27"-~ |E B,S>wS,I << is<^ft;'g-'- 't --bi-RIGHT: XMaS, i969.

sX S . .-.e*.v.... . ...s.

M .i.:. s5R t WNW.i...i ,, ,,,es

.. , <>, . l 4\" ..................... ''R;.,$ * .. ' A;+' <,; ............................

. > >, e j5 ,,-4, ,, > , , ,, * ,,1,t'- ~~~.............. #},, s t

them, two pink bodies, one embraced by a furry arm and leg, tear through

the wallpaper. Was it an orgy? A crime scene? The mood is far from innocent,

but not clearly sinister.

Tanning's sculptures, primarily made between 1969 and 1974, are three

dimensional matches for the effulgent figures found in her paintings and

drawings from the previous decade. By 1975, Tanning returned to her easel,

and the bodies once again took form in luminous oil on canvas.

ANN TEMKIN

138



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