Dorothea Tanning Book order

A concise introduction to the later work of the self-taught American Surrealist artist and author American Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) worked across painting, sculpture, printmaking, installation and writing over the course of seven decades, producing one of the 20th century's most enigmatic oeuvres. Tanning's work conjures dreamlike worlds that straddle the hazy border between figuration and abstraction, pioneering a unique prismatic formal language that resonates keenly today. This fully illustrated catalog highlights Tanning's works created between the 1950s and '90s, a particularly fruitful period in the artist's career, and traces her stylistic arc through over 20 significant paintings drawn from interrelated phases of the artist's practice. Scholars Mary Ann Caws, Victoria Carruthers and Kate Conley contribute essays to the volume; additionally, it reproduces Tanning's 1986 essay "To Paint," a poetic and impassioned manifesto on painting and Surrealism. The catalog takes its title from the last line of this text.

Still later, when I was more in touch with the world, they told me, "You have a future." I thought that over. Even if I believed them, what did my little future, whatever that was, have to do with the real thing, whatever that is? —from "Waiting" In this second daring collection, Coming to That, the centenarian painter and poet Dorothea Tanning illuminates our understanding of creativity, the impulse to make, and the longevity of art. Her unique wit and candor radiate through every poem, every line, and her inquisitive mind is everywhere alive and restless. As she writes in one poem, "If Art would only talk it would, at last, reveal / itself for what it is, what we all burn to know."

Chasm is the only novel by Dorothea Tanning, the famed surrealist artist, and was published when she was 93 years old.