I visited the Surréalisme exhibition in the Pompidou centre just before Christmas. It was wonderful seeing some of the massively famous works like Magritte’s L’Empire des lumières (1954) and of course various bits of Dalí. But even better were the surprises – and in particular Dorothea Tanning‘s work, which has an invitingly dark humour about it. Her first major painting, Birthday (1942) stopped me in my tracks. It is a self-portrait, and Tanning’s plaintive look out of the canvas is a big part of the work’s affect.
Since then I’ve discovered that another of her paintings, Tableau Vivant (1954) hangs at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, so obviously I need to pay it a visit. Marcel Duhamel describes it as being “a bit like having psychanalyzed [sic] your dog, then illustrated the phase of ‘transference,’ to use the jargon.” Tanning replied that her dogs were loathe to be psychoanalyzed.
