TamTam Books News

Tuesday, August 17, 2004:

At this point (and I am sure my regular readers have noticed) that the Observer/Guardian UK has the best interviews with artists - as well as great coverage of our (meaning the U.S.) recent 'little' troubles. In yesterdays paper, they printed an interview with Dorothea Tanning, who is a writer and visual artist. Sounds like a fantastic person!

The source of this interview:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1283191,00.html


'I've always been perverse'

At 15, a Surrealist before her time, Dorothea Tanning's paintings horrified her family. Now, sculptor, poet and, at 93, first-time novelist, the widow of Max Ernst reveals why moving on is better than painting like Chagall

Gaby Wood
Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer


Dorothea Tanning: the lead in an eventful, capricious and cerebrally screwball life
 Dorothea Tanning, the celebrated 93-year-old painter, sculptor, memoirist, novelist and poet, greets me at the door of her apartment on Fifth Avenue in lower Manhattan. She is moving with the aid of a walker on wheels; she can get around without it, she tells me (and there's no question of being helped) but she doesn't want to take any chances.

On the way to her living room, we pass, among other fleetingly seen treasures, one of her wonderful recent flower paintings, an oil by her husband of 30 years, Max Ernst, her fabric sculpture Don Juan's Breakfast - a kind of beer mug spilling over with fleshly foam - a framed collage letter from Joseph Cornell, and black-and-white photographs of the artist couple in earlier days - Tanning's face strong and mysterious, Ernst heroic-looking, his white hair billowing. In old photos she can look like French actress Arletty, or Hollywood star Rosalind Russell, both near-contemporaries of hers, now long dead. And, come to think of it, Tanning is the sort of character either of those women might have hoped to play; the lead in an eventful, capricious and cerebrally screwball life.

She leads me to a sofa, where we sit between a large Gustave Doré painting and a wall-mounted plasma TV. It has been suggested that Tanning might not want to speak about her relationship with Ernst, or about her involvement with Surrealism in the 1940s, but that turns out to be untrue. How could she not enjoy sharing her memories; she has written two autobiographies, after all. She only dislikes being labelled that way. 'That was one strike against me,' she says of the professional consequences of being married to Ernst. He, she adds, never referred to her as 'my wife', but always as 'Dorothea Tanning'. 'The second was being a woman. And the third was having been a Surrealist, a tag I might as well have tattooed on my arm like a concentration camp victim. I played at it very seriously. It was a big part of my life, but not all.'

Indeed not. Tanning will be 94 this month and she has just published her first novel, a magical Sadean nursery rhyme called Chasm, and her first book of poems, the kaleidoscopic A Table of Content. If labels are in order, she prefers to call herself the 'oldest living emerging poet'. 'Artists can change and move on,' she tells me, 'and that's much more interesting than being like Chagall, who painted the same damn thing all his life. Don't you think? I think that's like turning out shirts.'

Tanning is formidable but not cantankerous. She can be sly and full of unpredictable mischief. Her hair is done in two ornamental twists pinned to the sides of her head, and decorated with a piece of bright red yarn. Her skin is pale, though not a bit fragile, and her smile (which comes frequently) is accompanied by the most twinkling eyes I have ever seen. She can look stern, too - her irises seem suddenly to bore into yours - but her wit is such that each of these expressions can work either way: the smile might come with a mean turn of phrase and the frown can be a form of ironic punctuation.

Tanning has been writing all her life; as a possible career before she chose painting, as a distraction after hours at the easel, as a way of talking when she moved to France and 'lived a lot in my own language'. She began writing Chasm, the story of a little girl, a lion and a mysterious fetishistic stash of body parts, in the 1940s when she lived in Arizona, in order, she has said, to entertain Ernst on a trip through the desert. She writes poems now, when she can. She'd like to write a sequel to Chasm , and she could even write a third memoir, she says, if she had the energy. She pauses. 'I don't think it would be so pretty. If I did another one, it would be dark.'

What is unspoken here? I look across the room, at the painting of a little girl being carried off, listless, by an oversized dog; at the fractured, exploding forms above me, limbs melding with unknowable, brightly coloured forces. I think of the other children in her work, with mermaid tails or hair on fire, of the ghostly faces and the haunting doors stretching to infinity. She claims that her early life was uninteresting, but certain details give away her innate gothic affinities. In Birthday, her first memoir, Tanning writes that when her father took her to see westerns as a child, she'd lust after the villain. She smiles when I mention this. 'Yes,' she says with wistful pleasure, 'but I have been very perverse over a very long period and I don't suppose I'll be anything else.' She glances at my notebook. 'Are you writing all these crazy things down?'


Tanning was born on 25 August 1910. Her parents were Swedish emigrés (the surname was originally Thaning) who made their home in Galesburg, Illinois. She was the middle child of three girls and her mother had great theatrical ambitions for her. At the age of five, she developed an uncanny knack for weeping while reciting tragic poetry on stage. Two years later, she had made up her mind to become an artist. At 15, a Surrealist before the fact, she painted a naked woman with leaves for hair ('The family was horrified,' she recalls). A little later, she got a job in the children's section of the public library, where she read the fairytales of Madame d'Aulnoy and stories by Lewis Carroll, and then graduated to the adults', where 'immoral' books were flagged up in red. For the rest of her reading life, she continued to delight in 'everything that is as fantastical and as strange as possible'.

She left home at 20 and went to Chicago, where she worked as an artist's model, an illustrator, and a marionnettist at the World's Fair, and went on a date with a gangster she claims was called away and murdered while she waited at the bar. Next came New York, which is where she was when Surrealism hit the city in 1936, in the form of a large-scale exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. It had a big effect on her, she says now, 'because I thought, Gosh! I can go ahead and do what I've always been doing'.

Three years after that, she made it to Paris, armed with letters of introduction to artists she admired: Picasso, Kees van Dongen, Max Ernst. They proved useless: Tanning found a paralysed, deserted city on the brink of war.

In 1942, however, the very Paris she was looking for turned up on her doorstep and invited her out to play. Julien Levy, the man whose gallery represented the Surrealists in New York, took her on after seeing the only two canvases she had to show him. He invited her to a 'dazzling' party, where she met Max Ernst. Ernst had, along with his fellow German artist Hans Bellmer, been interned in a French PoW camp, and had fled Europe with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. Unfortunately, he was also married to her.

Not long afterwards, while recruiting artists for an exhibition called 30 Women at Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century, Ernst visited Tanning's studio. He was so impressed with her self-portrait, Birthday , that he persuaded Guggenheim to include Tanning and change the title to 31 Women. Guggenheim was later heard to say she wished she'd left it at 30, because within three weeks of that studio visit Ernst had moved in with Tanning. They married in 1946, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Julie Browner, and stayed together until he died in 1976.

When the war ended, the couple moved to the Arizona desert, and in 1952 they moved to France, where they stayed for the next 28 years. Tanning painted chilling, fanciful and virtuoso scenes, but in 1955 she broke off her involvement with Surrealism. 'I don't think you could call it one of those dramatic breaks,' she explains. She just sensed, after a time, that 'the whole movement was becoming a little artificial. I have a feeling that any movement, if you look back, has a lifetime of about 15 years. After that it becomes forced. Now people say this is surreal, or that is surreal, but they don't understand. Surrealism is not just incongruity. I went into it to see what you could do with paint. Not what you could do with some "cute ideas".'

After 1955, the forms in her paintings exploded into abstraction, into hazy entwined half-bodies and a fug of chalky or fire-like colours. It's as if you'd dreamed that the Sistine Chapel had been painted over by Francis Bacon. 'Every canvas,' she said, 'is a crisis, a convulsion.'

The 1960s saw her playing with smudged and tangled contours and patterns of perpetual motion; she embarked on her cloth sculptures in the 1970s (the Tate owns one, the Plexiglas-encased Reclining Nude ) and went on long after Ernst died - Notes for an Apocalypse, Family Portrait and Still in the Studio were all painted the following year. She and Ernst had 'never talked art,' she tells me. 'We just had fun. We both had senses of humour, and we enjoyed using them. But talking about technical problems, philosophical problems, psychological problems... we didn't need to talk about those. I think it's better not to talk. Because by the time you've talked it out you can't do anything.' I ask Tanning if she experienced, beyond her mourning, a kind of artistic liberation when Ernst died, and she concedes that she 'made as much art in those 20 years since as I had in 35 during'.

She returned to New York and moved into this apartment in 1981. In 1994, she had what she calls 'a kind of stroke', and had to stop painting. Then, two years later, she found six 'glorious stretched canvases' she'd brought back from France, and thought: 'Hell! I'm not going to let someone else use my canvases!' That was how she started on the flower paintings, a series of 12 lush, dark works now collected in a book entitled Another Language of Flowers.

While she was painting them, she fell back against a three-legged stool ('Never have a three-legged anything!' she warns me) and broke her right wrist. But she still went on. She hasn't painted since 1998: 'Painting is a physically strenuous thing,' she says. 'That's one reason I knew I'd have to write - or die.' But you never know the extent of her secret strength.

After a couple of hours, Tanning shows me around the apartment - the glorious aqua-hued self-portrait in the middle of Monument Valley ('That landscape is so red,' she says. 'I thought, "I'll do it in green"'), the portrait in which Ernst immortalised her (on seeing it, she said she felt she could now die), a Duchamp rotorelief, the large stuffed dog perched on the bidet, the wall of snapshots in her kitchen, the antique black typewriter she used to write on, the big, round bowls of brightly coloured candy. On her way back, she takes a bottle of Veuve Cliquot from the fridge and brings it, with two glasses, in her walker to the living room (she won't let me carry any of it). 'I can't open it,' she says after some effort with the cork, and adds, rather insistently, 'and you can't either!' She goes to get a contraption from the kitchen, loosens the cork and pours the champagne neatly, noiselessly, into the glasses. 'If there was a man in the room,' she says, 'he'd say, "Let me do it" and then he'd spill champagne all over the place!

'I thought you'd ask more about the novel,' she reflects. I say I think the novel speaks for itself, but is there something she'd like to add? 'I thought you might ask what on earth a little girl was doing playing with a lion in the desert at night.' And? 'Well, you didn't,' she smiles, 'so I don't have to tell you.' She says she never wanted children. Does she think it would have interfered with her career? 'More than that,' she exclaims. 'It would have ruined my life. It's all right if you're rich,' she adds, 'but we were poor.'

She pours another glass, tells me about the clothes she used to buy in Paris, from the models' sales at Yves Saint Laurent ('I had the tiniest waistline') and about how she set up Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny. Teeny used to be married to Pierre Matisse. Then Matisse left her for a woman called Patricia, who later married Matta. But Patricia was really in love with Duchamp. Meanwhile, Tanning and Ernst introduced Duchamp to Teeny and in the end Teeny got Marcel, when Patricia, who she'd been left for, wanted him all along. Call it Surrealist musical chairs or poetic justice. 'Yes,' Tanning thinks, 'poetic justice. That's a lovely way of putting it.'

Duchamp, she remembers, was an extraordinary person. Something to do with 'his oversimplification of life and how to live it'. What does she mean? 'He didn't do a damn thing!' She laughs. 'And he didn't pronounce on things either, but when he said something, it was true, because it was so simple.'

She speaks of surviving so many of her friends; how she left Paris because they were gone; and how people she'd looked forward to seeing in New York turned out to be already dead. 'Having fled the phenomena of death and disappearance in France,' she writes in Between Lives, her second memoir, 'I have since seen the folly of thinking to leave them there, like empty tubes of paint... because New York is Samarra, appointments have been kept.'

I ask her if she is afraid of dying. She smiles, more broadly than ever, takes my hand and says: 'I'm getting tired.' At first, I think she hasn't heard me; then I'm not so sure. Is this her answer? Tired of life? Or merely of this? In any case, I must go; I have been here three hours, I realise, and have not thought once of leaving. As she shows me to the door, I wonder whether my question about dying isn't irrelevant. Earlier, she had quoted a line from one of her favourite writers, Villiers de l'Isle Adam: 'Why live?' he wrote. 'The servants will do that for us.' She had laughed at the decadent, dated perversity of it. But she can hardly be said to have espoused it. One thing we do know is that Dorothea Tanning is not afraid of living and that is more than many of us can say.

· Chasm: A Weekend is published by Virago at £14.99.

Tosh // 7:32 AM
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