• collage and watercolor, 1988
• signed Dorothea Tanning and dated 88 lower right recto
• image size 17¼" x 18¼" (43.8 x 36.4 cm.)
• Provenance:  Kent Fine Art, New York
• Exhibited:
      Dorothea Tanning - Emotions: Collages 1988, Gallery Schlesinger, NY, Feb 1989
      Quirky, Adam Baumgold Fine Art, New York, Jan 06 - Feb 12, 2000
      Surrealism and its Affinities 2007, Gallery of Surrealism, New York, 2007
      Surrealism and Beyond, Die Galerie, Frankfurt, Sep 05 - Nov 09, 2019
      Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning, Kasmin Gallery, New York, Sep 04 - Oct 24, 2024 [REVIEW]
• Literature:
      Bailly, Dorothea Tanning, Braziller, NY, 1995, plate 234, p.240 (color)

...[W]e were intrigued by Dorothea Tanning's 1988 collage, Table of Contents, which appears as part of the front matter for this issue...In Tanning's collage, an arrow points assertively downwards at a table, set with plate (its glazed pattern an array of cats' paws, simultaneously stiff and pugnacious), knife and fork (both dangerously sharp). A napkin, or something much more troubling, pokes from underneath the crumpled, veil-like tablecloth. Beyond the place setting is framed, perhaps, a window (the arrow is on one of the window jambs). From behind a billowing black curtain - from the very background of the collage - emerges a tiny female figure, not entirely human, covering her ears and turning away from the scene.

Tanning had made paintings of dining tables before, while living with Max Ernst in France in the 1950s, in what might be called a magic surrealist style. People already appear at different scales, failing to engage with one another; the most animated creature is the dog. The Table of Contents of 1988 operates more like a cubist collage, in which fragments of inner and outer worlds are brought together, asking us to think about their relationships. The table setting is both familiar, domestic, and unsettling, hinting at violence. As a still life, it freezes a specific moment in such a way that we cannot help but ask what came before, and what will follow. In 2004, Tanning published a poem called A Table of Content which makes explicit the difficulty of bringing contents together, as well as the fecundity of doing so. It describes two tables, one hers (its contents part artistically arranged and aiming to please, part in disrespectful disarray), one his (a classroom table of multiplication when the class is adjourned and anything seems possible, desirable). It focuses on the moment their contents might coincide. "Why wait?" reads the penultimate line, before the final injunction: Wait .. Tanning describes the table with its contents as a tablemap. It presents for us a condition of provisional containment, of contingent contentment, and of connection, expected and unexpected. There is a vulnerability to it, a sense of power at play. Tables can be laid in a familiar way. They can also be cleared, turned, re-arranged.
  --- The Table of Contents - A Reflection on Editorial Work, Suzanne Ewing & Diana Periton, pp.7-24, published online: 30 Apr 2025