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 Dorothea Tanning   (1910-2012)

  Nude
  • lithograph, 1985
  • edition of 30 on Rives Newsprint Grey signed and numbered: 1-30 and an unspecified number of proofs including 4 artist's proofs on Rives Newsprint Grey signed and numbered: AP1-AP4 and 4 signed trial proofs, two on Arches and one on Rives Newsprint Grey
  • this example number 7 of 30 on Rives Newsprint Grey signed and numbered 7/30
  • plate size 16" x 8" (40.8 x 20.4 cm.)
  • paper size 30" x 22¼" (76.2 x 56.5 cm.)
  • printed by Maurice Sanchez assisted by Jamie Miller and Donna Shulman at Derriere L'Etoile, New York
  • Literature:  Dorothea Tanning: Hail, Delirium!, New York Public Library, 1992, catalog no.53, pp.75, 102-3
I wanted to draw from a model so, having none, I pretended that I did. Mylar, the support, closely resembles the grainy stone used formerly, but does not allow scratching out - or scratching in.
      -Dorothea Tanning, Hail, Delirium!, 1992, catalog raisonne

My own feeling is that, as her art develops, Tanning's surfaces become more hermetically abstract, paralleling the development of her image of woman as an autonomous, Dionysian figure. But this is hardly absolute, for Tanning is able, unexpectedly, to go completely outside herself - to observe the other as well as express her sensitivity to herself - as indicated by Nude (1985; cat.53), her image of a pensive adolescent girl, whose body is in shadow. This image may be obliquely self-referential, as though it was the shadow of Tanning's memory of her own body that unconsciously fell across the girl's body, who thus becomes a hadean ghost from the past of the self. But the nude is vibrantly contemporary and forcefully descriptive, rather than timelessly abstract.
      -Donald Kuspit, The Amorphousness of Being Other: Dorothea Tanning's Prints, Hail Delirium, catalog raisonne
Dorothea Tanning - Nude - 1985 lithograph enlarge in new window

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