Dorothea Tanning: Insomnias

This was the first Tanning exhibition since Birthday and Beyond, the retrospective that the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted in 2000 to mark their acquisition of Tanning’s celebrated 1942 self-portrait, Birthday.  In the 1940s, when she was one of the painters in Julien Levy’s stable, Tanning painted within the idiom of surrealist representation. By the mid-50s, her work had radically changed.  As Tanning explains, “Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered . . . I broke the mirror, you might say.”  The Insomnias — the group takes its name from a painting of the same title that Tanning made in 1957 — are forays into the realm of conjured energies. They represent a forceful shift at a particular, postwar moment that continues to reverberate today.

Essays by Dr. Charles Stuckey and Richard Howard