Dorothea Tanning: Insomnias 1954-1965

Dorothea Tanning, who was born in 1910 in Galesburg, a town on the Illinois prairie, is one of America’s major surrealist artists. She first came to fame in the 1940s when she showed in the gallery of Julien Levy, New York’s preeminent dealer of surrealism. However, in the 1950s she felt a growing need to move beyond the prevailing idiom of surrealist representation. She describes what happened: “Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered . . . I broke the mirror, you might say.” The resulting paintings are vibrant with faceted colors and shifting spaces. The Insomnias — the group takes its name from a painting of the same title that Tanning made in 1957 — are forays into the realm of conjured energies; they represent a vigorous expansion of form and content at a crucial historical moment that continues to reverberate today. Charles Stuckey describes these “seemingly multidimensional mindspaces” as “among the most ambitious and sophisticated paintings to address the dilemmas of imagination and culture in a new atomic, space-race age.”