Dorothea Tanning Beyond Max Ernst’s Shadow

A new biography attempts to make the case for Tanning’s independence and artistic strength in her own right, but remains frustratingly tethered to her husband.

Alyce Mahon’s new book Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World offers a panoramic, well-researched view of the artist’s life and work. Mahon grounds Tanning’s biography in womanhood — how Tanning faced immense pressure and beat odds, emerging as a standout artist on her own, despite often being attached to her husband, Max Ernst. Unfortunately, the work is overly ambitious and too academic, and fractures under this load. Although it offers moments of interesting, new insight, the book is bogged down by tedious cobbling together of others’ reviews of Tanning’s oeuvre, and a forced attempt to disentangle her from Ernst. The result is a book that is both lukewarm and overly defensive of its subject.

She quickly became enthralled with Surrealism after attending the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. From there, her life followed its own surreal trajectory: in 1939, she visited Paris with a list in hand of artists she wanted to meet. Still an ingenue, she discovered Paris was an eerie ghost town, with war on the horizon. One of the artists she had hoped to meet in Paris was Ernst, whom she would later meet in New York in 1942 and marry in 1946.