Dorothea Tanning; Tate Modern; March 2019; 10/10

This is a huge show and shows what an accomplished and prolific painter Tanning was.  She was a highly skilled figurative painter and a brilliant abstractionist.  If you look for no more than skill then this is a must-see exhibition.

I didn’t read any reviews of this show before going.  After returning I’ve glanced at a couple, but they seem to completely miss the point.  Maybe it’s just me but I thought this show more than Gothic, more than Surrealist I found it disturbing.  Nothing in the Tate’s captions or exhibition booklet refers to my suspicions of what her work was really about, and I find that even more worrying.

So, to begin with it must be understood that Tanning claimed that her pictures painted themselves so we must assume that they reveal her subconscious. One caption says that she rejected specific interpretations of her work saying that they are open to the imagination - the artist’s usual obscuration.

Let’s look first at The Guest Room 1950-52.  Here is a naked girl with the face, legs and hands of a woman, I’m assuming Tanning herself. To her right is her blindfolded twin.  In front of her is a leering figure with a phallic proboscis.  Above them are Tanning’s signature crumpled sheets. The position of the viewer is voyeur through a half open door.  It’s not just me surely – there is something deeply disturbing going on here.

Close by is another work Family Portrait (Portrait de Famille) 1954 which now becomes a crucial text. Who is the blond girl, is it Tanning?  Her tiny mother has no more power and status than the dog.   The father figure looms over everything. In the film at the end Tanning says that she had a happy family life – this painting seems to deny that.  In the film she explains that the dog is a childhood pet that she felt knew and understood everything.

Twenty years later Tanning painted another Portrait de Famille 1977.  OK does she have to shout it out: what sort of family is this?Here the all-knowing dog/Dorothea seems to be crushed by a lesbian orgy. 

In The Philosophers 1952 the sense of coercive sex is plain. I should note her that the rumpled sheets that appear again and again in Tanning's paintings are the counterpoint to the neatly folded tablecloth that she paints in works like Some Roses and their Phantoms.  The neatly folded tablecloth itself strange - surely the most proper tablecloth is simply ironed flat, represents bourgeois comfort and rumpled sheets its opposite.

In Room 4 we see later abstracted paintings.  Tanning always painted her crumpled translucent sheets in washes and the abstractions that are grouped here were created using the same technique.  They are marvellous just as paintings. I suggest however that they are a new way in which she reproduced an image of inner turmoil.  Sex, darkness and conflict are in them. 

In Deux Mots 1963 a prepubescent girl recoils from sinister shadow.

In Pour Gustave l’adoré 1974 we see twisted naked thighs

In the 1980’s paintings like Door 84 1984 and Daughters 1983 surely speak of some childhood trauma.  Incidentally the brushwork in the left panel of Door 84 is superb.

 Door 84 1984

Daughters 1983

The earlier work Notes for an Apocalypse 1978 seems decidedly about family life turned upside down.  In Door 84, Daughters, Notes for an Apocalypse and The Philosophers we see legs uncomfortably split open.

In the film Tanning says that her extraordinary stuffed sculptures were born “from [her] rage”. Their forms echo those in her paintings. In room 5 the tortured form in Embrace 1969 is echoed in the surrounding paintings: Tango Lives 1977, Far From 1964, Inutile 1969 and Même les Jeunes Filles 1966.

Embrace 1969

Tango Lives 1977

Inutile 1969

Même les Jeunes Filles 1966

In Tango Lives close dancing seems to become a symbol of sexual violation. The twisted hands in this painting crate a form that I feel echoes through her work. There are other recurring motifs in her painting e.g. intrusions into the world/consciousness that appear through walls – suppressed memories, horrors.  Things on tables are weird in a disturbing way.  Somehow the strange objects on the table in Family Portrait 1954 are similar to those in Some Roses and their Phantoms 1952.

Some Roses and their Phantoms 1952 

The cylindrically nippled breast in Hôtel du Pavot (opium poppy)1970-73 is another recurring motif.

I cannot say what was behind all these paintings, but it was surely something ugly.