Dorothea Margaret Tanning (1910-2012) was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Her early work was influenced by Surrealism. In 1935 Tanning moved to New York, where she began working as a freelance illustrator, creating advertisement designs for Macy’s department store and other clients until the early 1940s. In December 1936 she visited Alfred H. Barr Jr’s ground-breaking exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, which included work by the likes of Eileen Agar, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Marcel Duchamp and Louis Aragon. The surrealist works she saw there had a profound effect on Tanning and she felt an affinity with the artists on show. Tanning and Ernst married in October 1946. When Ernst died in Paris on 1 April 1976, aged 84, Tanning was bereft. ‘There is no light in the studio,’ she wrote, ‘nothing moves and the colored jokes are fading fast. Tanning died in New York on 21 January 2012, aged 101.
