Between Lives: An Artist and Her World

by Dorothea Tanning

The life and times of one of our most enchanting artists; a twentieth-century fairy tale, lovingly remembered and luminously told. Fourteen years ago, the artist Dorothea Tanning published Birthday, a collection of reminiscences. Now she has expanded it into a memoir of her journey through the last century as confidant, collaborator, and muse to some of its most inspired minds and personalities: a diverse assemblage that ranges from the fathers of dada and surrealism to Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, Joan Miró, James Merrill, and many more. At its center is the relationship, tenderly rendered, between Tanning and her famed husband, the enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst.

Whether recalling the poignant presence of her friend Joseph Cornell or simply marveling at the facades along a Venice canal, "their filmy reflections fluttering in the dirty canal like fragile altar cloths hung out to dry," Tanning's writing is beguiling, wry, and shot through with the same eye for pregnant detail and immanent magic that marks her art.

Genres: Art, Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Womens

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2001

About the author

Dorothea Tanning was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer. She has also designed sets and costumes for ballet and theatre.

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had me swirling.

One page enraptured…

The next alienated.

Women.

Or rather – Woman –

Beautiful

Stylish

Expressive

Sensitive

Creative

Naturally mythic

But swirly, diaphanous, veiled, veiled, veiled,

and veiled again.

Houri. Belly dancer.

Specifically ambiguous. Alluring. Intimately distant.

Is it offensive to say that in this book Dorothea Tanning expressed herself in an exclusively feminine way, in a way that no man could, or should even want to?

Counter to the brain worlds men build,

yet she could challenge them at chess.

So shadowed by her man Max Ernst that her memoir, when it can, speaks of him.

But that shadow self-sufficient. Self-sufficient in unspecific ways.

Watery strength.

The power to merge in all directions at once.

Fashioned with layers upon layers of the unnecessary, the logic-eluding superfluous, brainy but as if a brain dissolving, rebuilding as it’s dissolving, solving, dissolving, oceanic, tidal.

Vague gravity of tremendous allure.

Vaguely fearful allure.

Edgeless all-enveloping allure turn around and you’re entangled.

Yet each detail sensually specific.

Intoxicating foam.

Perfumed fattiness. Lithe fat. Sensuous blur.

Continuous construction of dissolution.

And all the while I’m thinking – She wrote a good part of this book when she was 90!

Beautiful woman.

Where do you begin?

Men begin and end

but women don’t.

[El · Rating 3 out of 5]

ETA 02/03/12: Dorothea Tanning has died. Hearing the news sort of makes me want to go home and curl up in a pile of her paintings.

___

Dorothea Tanning is known most for her paintings and as a sculptor. She was also a writer, and this book is a nice venture into a different landscape of an artist. She married Surrealist painter Max Ernst in the Forties, and he introduced her to Surrealism. One of her more popular Surrealist paintings is Eine kleine Nachtmusik though I am personally equally fascinated by Birthday . I'm intrigued by her use of doors. (Are they entrances or exits? Let's psychoanalyze.)

This book reads like a journal-turned-memoir which is essentially what she admits it to being. She writes about her life - not so much as an artist as just a woman living a life in the Forties. She talks about the people she knew, from Joan Miro to John Cage; she talks about visiting Corsica (be still my heart!) and introducing Chilean painter, Matta ( Le Dauphin de la Memoire ), to the island. But a lot of the book centers on her husband, Max Ernst ( L'Ange du Foyeur ).

Okay, here's my thing. I have issues with a lot of artistic couples. So often we generally know so much about the male in the relationship that their wife/girlfriend/partner is generally ignored or considered less an artist. It happened to Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes, it happened to Frida Kahlo with Diego Riviera, it happened to Lee Krasner with Jackson Pollock, and I believe it happened to Dorothea Tanning with Max Ernst. How many people here have at least heard the name Max Ernst? Now how many people have at least heard the name Dorothea Tanning? I can't see hands, but I have a feeling Dorothea didn't get quite the same shout out that Max Ernst did. Maybe I'm wrong, it doesn't really matter. I like seeing what the wifeys could do, and I love what I've seen of Tanning's art. The writing left something to be desired at times, but then at other times she wrote entire paragraphs that made me want to re-read it again and again.

Biggest complaint? The book was published in 2001 yet the photo inserts were all in black and white. Wha--? A painter's work, if initially done in color, should always be shown in color. What a freaking slap in the face to have your work show up in black and white. WTF.

In any case I highly recommend this for art obsessed geeks especially, or anyone who feels the woman gets the shaft a lot in artistic relationships. (And I know you're out there.) Artists of any kind (professional or personal scribblers or anything in between) can appreciate a lot of Tanning's thoughts on how one perceives life and how one perceives art.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/be...

From the very first paragraph I was struck with the quality of her writing, the sophistication of this woman, and the treat that was in store for me by reading this autobiography. If it weren’t for my prior reading of Fish Out of Water by Claire-Louise Bennett I would likely have never discovered Tanning who, before becoming one of our great artists, was originally just a midwestern girl from a small town in Illinois, a town that produced another icon named Carl Sandburg, and is proof that artists come from many backgrounds and can rise from the ashes of anywhere. Tanning simply wanted to be a painter, an artist, but her first teachers saw no talent present in her work. And still she persisted. Working to support herself as a twenty year-old waitress in Chicago she attended a few art classes and looked for opportunities to further her goal of being a painter. Naive, and early on while interviewing for a job as an illustrator, Tanning was taken advantage of as she was strangely required to pose nude for the interview and never heard another word from the company. She also accepted a dinner date with a Chicago mobster, went by car to his local hangout, was shortly abandoned on a barstool long enough for him to be gunned down a block away. All this happened within the first thirty-five pages.

...Here, gathered inside an innocent concrete building, are signposts so imperious, so laden, so seductive, and, yes, so perverse that, like the insidious revelations of the Galesburg Public Library, they would possess me utterly. From that day “aberrance” was for me a meaningless three syllables, and “deviate” another three, synonymous with the glorious minorities. My own drawings, technically timid scraps of old obsessions, stayed underground…

What I love about Tanning is her willingness to delve into the deviant and aberrant ideas presented in books, photographs, and paintings. That is what has interested me as well for as long as I can remember. In my reading this morning I came upon another mention regarding letter-writing and how important these communications were and still are in light of the social media posts, emails, and tweets we all are subjected to today. For the last year my wife and I have been writing back and forth about our memories through the many years of being together, not to mention the countless childhood events and examples that shaped the individuals we were becoming. Our writing back and forth cannot replace the art of letter writing, nor add to a pile of opened envelopes stacked and saved in a cardboard box. But it counts, all of them, as a way in which to save ourselves as if our lives did matter even if nobody else feels the same way. The fact the Dorothea admits to being intimately drawn to the deviant provides solace for both of us ex-Lutherans as we reveal our own aberrant behaviors in regards to adulterous sex and the abundant and personal nude images we have and still produce for the page.

Max Ernst came calling at her brownstone door in hopes of procuring a painting for an exhibition he was curating that was later called Thirty-one Women. Noticing that Tanning had a chess photograph pinned over her drawing board he challenged her to a game and for the next week they played everyday until he abruptly moved in, bringing with him his vast and growing collection of tribal artifacts. It is a beautiful love story and one that carries with it a very good ending.

...His stories of these crazies, which I must say he told with a certain relish, made me long to be mad, too. Oh, I want to be wild , I would moan...I wanted, ah, how deeply, that superb indifference to reason, to the a fortiori and the therefore. It was an insouciance that was never to be mine. It was a tragedy that I, foolish woman, would be spared…

How often is this the case? What wife would not dream of being the object of affection, not only of her husband but by their friends. My wife claims not to be sexually interested in anyone but me, but that is not the entire truth. She means well, of course, but this life, her body, her looks, her brain, are what she has to offer to this world and she should not be rejected or crucified because of it. Men have wanted her, and still do, and that is not a crime.

...It would also be not quite there, immediately. I wanted to lead the eye into spaces that hid, revealed, transformed all at once and where there would be some never-before-seen image, as if it had appeared with no help from me…

In the beginning, and for years afterward, this was my own method for writing my poetry. Never did I know what would transpire on the page but I knew it had to come from feeling and a strict observance of my object. My goal was to establish a soiling somewhat, to have my reader leave the page not knowing exactly what had happened there, but feeling slightly dirty after the effort, that is, if any attempts were actually made.

... She knows that her man is the true immortal and that she is envied by numberless members of her sex who are waiting to replace her should anything go wrong…

I understand this. I have felt the same about my own relationship. Though I am the one published, and continue to spew forth words on the page, it is my love, the love of my life that is, and should be, the immortal one. And that is what I intend to accomplish eventually. I am not envied for my work but instead, by those who actually know me, for the partner I have walked this lonely path with and how she has provided the impetus for my work.

...for a girl there is no greater handicap to creativity and self-fulfillment in the solitary arts than physical prettiness…

Dorothea Tanning knew how it felt to be seen as a second fiddle. She also knew firsthand the man’s world she lived in. Thankfully that is not so much the case today though the patriarchal stains and open wounds remain. After Max Ernst died Tanning learned how to live differently, not better perhaps, but alone with her own art and memories.

...An artist is the sum of his risks, I thought, the life-and-death kind…Incidentally, it may be said here that although I have never known erotic love with a woman, I think it might have been quite rewarding as any other kind. To be enfolded by smooth round arms in that subtle sort of entwinement; to do anything else that would have defined our tender passion for each other; I might have liked that. We would have had celestial orgasms, profound quietudes, and perfect understanding. We would have known, without utterance, our common frailty and ferocity—so endless a treasure of potential…

Tanning relates a sexual story that is at once dangerous and confusing to her. Like other artists, when placed in jeopardy, Tanning later considers the possibilities of the affair and how she might use them in her work. In many ways we creators live vicariously through our art and become the liberated creatures we never could have realized in our own lifetimes.

...It is not all joy as they would have us believe...As you drag lines like ropes across one brink of reality after another, annihilating the world you made yesterday and hated today, a new world heaves into sight…

Nearing the end of this wonderful memoir I am struck with the honesty and vibrant love found in this work. Tanning goes to great length in her marvelous and sophisticated prose to show us all the frustrations involved in creating great art, all art, including poetry, especially if the artist herself is serious. There is nothing casual or recreational in creating something of worth. It is not a joyful act nor pleasurable to look again at what the previous day produced. It is work. And it is also an act of severe honesty to admit and know one’s defeat. It begins as courage to destroy what has come before and begin again. Later it becomes second nature and proves time and time again to be the answer to the riddle set before us. And maybe it is not a riddle but something deeply hidden in our subconscious willing itself to emerge if only the artist will allow it to surface. Sometimes it is floating within a trance or slightly out of reach inside a hallucination. Being a god and creating a new world on any given day is all that matters. It is obvious Tanning shared my belief in what art means and what it can provide in this vast desert called the soul.

[Francesca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book over several months, as the burgeoning of a dream in my own life grew and took hold, was pursued and gradually (now) is coming to its fierce conclusion. It seems fitting that this memoir, which is as much about the life of the artist (specifically a female, moderately successful visual artist) as it is the seemingly infinite parade of celebrities, artists, novelists, writers, actors, and characters Tanning encounters in her world of the title, was my chosen accompaniment to my pursuit of an artistic utopia in my own life.
I was extremely excited to read this book & had been thinking about picking it up for several years when I finally did, at City Lights in San Francisco, on an impossibly lovely short vacation. It spelled out the promise to me, when I first encountered it, of how to LIVE NOW, which I hoped might be revealed to me by yet again immersing myself in the fading yet still evocative glamour, intellectual and sexual hedonism, experimentalism and sheer style of the 30s Modernists so beloved of my teenage years (Woolf, the Bloosmberries, the Sitwells, Beaton, and the still-more fantastic Dadaists & Surrealists whose biographies I had devoured growing up). I hoped that within these pages I might find that world still secretly breathing & awaiting whatever would bridge might take me to its present incarnation.
Tanning's prose is the bridge. In this work she crafts a singular style, utterly hers and yet quite unpredictable. The language is luxuriant, the phrasing often so gorgeous that one quite loses the meaning or thread of what she is saying - no problem in poetry or experimental prose, but for the memoirist, something of an issue. I can't count the number of times I read a sentence or two then skipped back to see if I had missed something major - but no, Tanning just brings a sense of occasion to every circumstance of her life that her long and impressive memory yields. Nonetheless, the writing is extraordinarily poetic, & of the highest quality. I suspect one of the ways it is possible to interpret the interstitial space hinted by the title is between the disciplines of artist and writer, and happily, this document shows her finding her way there, in her 90s. What an inspiration!
Because of her twisty and, it must be admitted, occasionally clunky and excessively dramatic prose style, it took me a very long time to finish this book, and so I have forgotten most of it!! Which is a shame, because it's an excellent tale. Dorothea Tanning was for so many years known as 'the wife of Max Ernst', though thankfully our era has recognized her as an artist in her own right - not least for the infamous 'Birthday'. Yet although I don't wish to speak immediately of Max Ernst and so eclipse Tanning's brilliance again, I must say that her writing about their relationship strikes me as some of the most beautiful I have read on long-term, intimate partnership. There is the early, heady romance which seems never to pall, only mature. There is his enigma, his quietness, the mystery of his suffering as a hunted man in WW2, which naturally distances him from her. There is the companionship of both being artists on a quest that involves their memories, souls, bodies and brains, building a home first in Arizona before escaping the desert to France. It touched me deeply as an example of deep, tolerant, unconventional yet faithful love, and I know I will return to the book for that reason alone.
But there is so much else to enjoy here! Tristan Tzara's lurid apartment & witty cruelty, Andre Breton's vanity, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, tea and Vogue anecdotes with Truman Capote, building a house in a desert (no really that was not a joke), John Cage softly chuckling to himself... it doesn't come much richer than this.
And yet the real gift comes at the end, as Tanning recounts the process of creating her landmark paintings - the daily routine and the sensual experience of an artist's life. These passages are worth the price of admission alone. I recommend that all artists and writers seek it out.
Tanning comes off as a likeable, decent and incredibly smart, yet also unpretentious and sensitive person. Her love for art and hunger for life leads her into alliances both firm and fragile, adventures both exotic and undesirable. She never loses consciousness of herself as a woman artist, and this is pertinent and moving in an era before the advent of Seventies feminism, whose later desire to claim her as an icon among women she cannot understand. In this respect she is a product of her time despite being ahead of it, desiring to be seen as one of the boys whilst fiercely proud of her femininity, but lacking what the feminists might describe as 'solidarity with fellow women' on the basis of shared struggle alone. She laments that she is not a 'madwoman' such as those the Surrealists, including Ernst, had idealised, fallen in love with, bedded and dismissed once they became too irritating, and this is interesting because it shows the ways in which she may have had to blind herself to the double standards of the male compatriots she ran with.
Nevertheless, out of her sanity and bravery, Tanning created an extraordinary life and many fascinating works of art, and it is my hope that her recent passing will trigger a resurgence of interest (and please, full-colour catalogues) of her exceptional artwork - the reproductions of which we can only squint at in cramped black and white here.

Maybe I did not find what I was looking for, but the impetus to go out and seek it for myself, which perhaps, was really what I was looking for all along.

[Jack Prendergast · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really glad I read this book. Definitely have a much deeper understanding of the kind of person Dorothea Tanning was. Still blown away that someone who grew up essentially in the middle of nowhere would go on to become this globe trotter and genuinely influential figure in the art world. The contrast between her origins and where she ultimately landed makes her story even more astonishing.

The writing leaned a bit too poetic and abstract for my personal taste at times. While her lyrical style is undeniably beautiful, I found myself wishing she had pulled back the curtain more directly on topics like the dynamics of her and Max’s relationships with all the incredible artists they were friends with or really just things more directly to her own art.

A compelling read about an incredible artist.

[Jesse Wiedel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Dorothea Tanning's paintings. Her writing style is also very smart and fluid, so this is a good read. As a painter myself, I was hoping she would write more about her painting. It wasn't until about page 316 that she devotes a chapter solely to painting, and it is solid gold. Most of the book is about her husband, Max Ernst, which was kind of disappointing. She doesn't say much about his paintings either.

[Whitney Huston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguing book about an incredible life, that is offered not as something to revered but to be contemplated. Despite that, I found myself longing for her life. Captivating.

[Pamela Wetherill · Rating 3 out of 5]

She's not a writer. After reading this I don't know Dorothea Tanning any better than before reading it. Or any of the multitude of interesting people she know.

[Lacey Christiansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dorothea Tanning is a wonderful artist and I am a fan of her artwork. Being so, I chose to include her in a research paper that I wrote about women Surrealists and their contributions to the movement. I picked this book up in hopes that it would offer some insights into both her work and her personal life. What I found was overtly flowery language (I should have expected as much as she was a successful poet) and a kind of strange layering of anecdotal snapshots from her life in a roughly linear layout (well, she was a Surrealist). There were some interesting tidbits, some engaging tales, some factoids, some name dropping, some emotion, and some drudgery. There is nothing in particular that I can pinpoint that made me not like the book, but I just wasn't impressed. It always seemed like the information she was presented was highly curated and she was holding back. I would not recommend this book for research purposes, much better and more succinct information can be gleaned elsewhere. Many portions of the book are about other people who crossed her path. However, if you are a fan of the artist and her work, you will get a sense of her voice and the "lives" she lived.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fiercely adored this memoir. The childhood was done with such a light touch, so impressionistically. And her rah-rah youth with great subtlety. She had fun, you know, without your knowing. Ernst comes through...want to know more. And she dances around her career, yet ends with a focus on it that is loving. Not quite elliptical the whole, not reserved, and yet, deeply bounded while equally pleasing. Wish I could write this way.

[Chrissie]

Memoir of Dorothea Tanning, the wife of Surrealist painter Max Ernst and their friendship with other like-minded artists such as Giacometti, Miro and ballet choreographer George Balanchine. I need to read this book b/c I adore the "friends" mentioned. Have you seen a ballet by Balanchine? Everyone can spot a tall, thin Giacometti figure and Miro.....

Wow Daisy, where did you find this book?!

[Jai Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been meaning to read this for ages. Finally getting to it! Dorothea Tanning married max Ernst and recently in her 90s published her first novel. Amazing painter too!

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing and exceptional life lived.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Spectacularly overwritten but the first chapter is worthwhile and there are some interesting, gossipy bits throughout.

[Lizzie]

Jo Ann Beard mentions this in the interview at the back of In Zanesville .

[Marney Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ms. Tanning has written a loving look of life and art with her famous husband Max Ernst. She paints a book with words that are so poignant you are totally immersed in her feelings.