Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealism Invites Us to Sit With Uncertainty

“Please don’t ask me to explain them,” Dorothea Tanning once said of her paintings. “I just don’t think it’s possible.”

Tanning, who died in 2012 at the age of 101, had a career in the arts that spanned several movements, but Surrealism was always close to her heart. She was working as a commercial artist in New York when the Museum of Modern Art mounted its influential 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, a show that had a lasting impact on the young painter’s aesthetic interests and style. She would become known, for the next seven decades, for her figurative paintings, which often portrayed women and girls navigating labyrinths of doorways.

Tanning’s love of Surrealism was also personal. Her introduction to the circle of émigré Surrealists in New York segued into a 30-year marriage to the German painter and sculptor Max Ernst. Tanning too experimented with sculpture, as well as writing fiction and poetry.

Following a 2018 retrospective that traveled from Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía to London’s Tate Modern, Tanning’s latest posthumous exhibition is Musical Chairs, at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. The show, which includes a handful of works by Tanning alongside real chairs (not made by Tanning), centers on the exhibition’s namesake, a painting that’s on view for the first time in the United States in over 70 years.

The 1951 canvas shows a female figure bent in a contortionist’s pose as she slides off the red velvet upholstery of a tilting chair. The background is a torrent of yellow and green fabric, another chair partially obscured. While essentially Surrealist, the picture also boasts elements of Futurism — a movement that preceded Surrealism and prioritized capturing a sense of motion — and even Cubism, the crumpled fabric evoking a sense of fractured space. Perpetual motion and shifting vantages would remain hallmarks of the painter’s career.

The broad range of influences on Tanning’s practice are even more apparent in the juxtaposition of Musical Chairs with Door 84, which Tanning painted 33 years later in 1984. The piece consists of two canvases bisected by a wooden door protruding vertically from the wall. Each canvas contains a colorful, expressionistic rendering of a female figure straining to keep the door closed from either side. The diptych merges assemblage, an Abstract Expressionist painting style and Pop sensibilities, something like a hybrid of Jasper Johns, Joan Mitchell and Lisa Yuskavage. Clearly, in the decades after Musical Chairs, Tanning incorporated even more artistic influences into her repertoire, synthesizing them all through a Surrealist lens.

In addition to these major works, the exhibition consists of three smaller, early pieces — one painting and two ink drawings — as well as a rare portfolio of seven lithographs.

The two small drawings, of women in ball gowns, show Tanning’s segue from commercial illustration into fine art painting. In the oil-on-canvas Fatala, she has arrived. A waifish woman embraces a door which is also the cover of a book, her hand slipping through the hole where the doorknob ought to be. The inside pages are revealed to contain wigs and tassels, all easily confusable for each other. Looking at the painting is necessarily disorienting, and makes you wonder what actually setting foot in such a landscape would be like, until you remember that, for the Surrealists, these eerie, dream-like settings already were examinations of the strangeness of lived experience.

In partnership with contemporary design gallery The Future Perfect, Tanning’s work here has been paired with a selection of chairs by five designers and design studios. The assortment is fittingly whimsical, including a woven wicker seat that itself resembles a seated figure, and a wooden construction similar to an easel.

​​The inclusion of chairs in the exhibition alludes to Tanning’s own mid-career divergence into sculpture. In the 1970s, while living in Paris, she created what today might be called an “immersive” installation. Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 was a hotel room filled with life-sized dolls bursting through the walls and melting into the furniture, like one of her own paintings brought to life. Chambre 202 had more to do with psychological interiority than interior design, bringing the surreal into reality. Here, the chairs pad an otherwise spare exhibition, but the depth of Tanning’s works more than make up for their small number.

The metaphor of musical chairs also extends to Tanning herself. She occupied several artistic roles during her long lifetime, and uncertainty was perhaps her only constant. In the epigraph to Tanning’s first poetry collection, A Table of Content she wrote, “It’s hard to be always the same person.” Her only novel was about a masquerade ball.

Tanning’s apparent persistent, personal bewilderment — unable to explain her work, unsure of who she was — is reflective of the radical uncertainty foundational to the Surrealist sensibility. For these artists, Surrealism was not about disorientation but rather the embrace of cognitive dissonance, something realer than real in the context of postwar life.

While Tanning resisted a feminist interpretation of her art, her female subjects seem to oscillate between being at the mercy of the surreal and assuming agency in their navigation of it. Tanning was a woman always on the move, reconfiguring her conceptual position and stylistic approach to best suit her ongoing exploration of the unknown.

And maybe that’s the point. The only constant is change; the only sure thing is that which is unsure, unfixed and unreal. Musical Chairs invites us to sit with that uncertainty.

‘Musical Chairs’ is on view at Gallery Wendi Norris (436 Jackson St., San Francisco) through May 4, 2024.