Artist Dorothea Tanning from her intense five‐year adventure in soft sculpture, from the series Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202, Xmas, Rainy day Canapé and a couple more. Dorothea Tanning died at her home in New York City on January 31, 2012 – 101 years old. Wauw! Via Women Artists. source link here.
Fabric, wool, synthetic fur, cardboard, and Ping-Pong balls, 133 7/8 x 122 1/8 x 185 in.
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Tweed, upholstered wood sofa, wool, Ping-Pong balls, and cardboard, 32 1/4 x 68 1/2 x 43 1/4 in.
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Anonymous gift.
For Tanning the five year period of making work that culminated in Hotel de Pivot was a time as an outsider. She was working with materials that she “wasn’t supposed to” as an established painter, and she was working on pieces that were not “marketable” at all. But she was establishing a world with wools and tweeds, and a formal language that had not been previously worked out by anyone on a canvas. Thus, the three dimensional world of Hotel du Pivot becomes more than an image; it’s a pinnacle point in Tanning’s artistic development.
Tanning used two mediums to produce the elements in Hotel De Pivot: she embraced the thick wool and tweed that was locally manufactured in the French countryside; and she gathered found objects that resided within her immediate surrounds. The tweed and wool act as a base or canvas for the work and describe the formal qualities. The found lace, ceramic, and sewing pins reinforce her poetic titles and narrative. One can read the fabric as the structure of the poem and the found objects as the filigree.
Tanning’s marriage to Max Ernst meant that she was his help mate. Her time to work was after Ernst’s needs were satisfied. So this five year burst of fabric manipulation is intriguing in relation to her life time of work. Before this period she painted, and after this she devoted herself to writing. Tanning the polymath, and her journey as a polymath, is an exciting image, and the aforementioned structure of the fabric work establishes the sculptural work as a bridge to her final career as a poet. The framework of Tanning’s painting always involved a three dimensional space, so her need to actually build that condition to resolve the stories in her imagination is obvious. Imagining Tanning somewhere in a studio wrestling with Tweed and Wool to build the images in her head is truly inspiring.
—Annie Coggan
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Emma, 1970
Fabric, wool, and lace, 11 11/16 x 25 3/8 x 21 5/8 in. (body: 11 1/4 x 22 x 12 1/2 in.)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, acquired through the generosity of the William T. Kemper Foundation—Commerce Bank, Trustee, 2006.27
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