"Surrealism" continues its two-year tour at the Musée National d'Art Contemporain, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris through January 13, 2025. The exhibition celebrates the centennial of the Surrealist movement, with each partnering museum enhancing the core travelling group of works in all media with a focus on their own collections. It premiered at The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, in Spring 2024, and after Paris will travel to Hamburger Kunsthalle; Fundación MAPFRE Madrid; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Among the works on view in Paris is the painting Birthday (1942).

"31 Women: An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim" is on view at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid,  through January 5, 2025. presents a selection of works by the artists who participated the landmark 1943 exhibition at Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century.  The show features the 1943 painting Moeurs Espagnoles.

"The Subterranean Sky: Surrealism in the Moderna Museet Collection" is on view at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm through January 11, 2025.  Drawing from the permanent collection and select loans, the exhibition marks the centennary of the movement and includes the sculpture Don Juan's Breakfast (1972) and the painting Insomnias (1957).

"A Century of Surrealism" will be celebrated at University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson through February 1, 2025 with works from the Museum's permanent collection.  The exhibition will showcase the influences and participants in the Surrealist movement from the mid 1920s to 1980, emphasizing the diffusion of its ideas and techniques in the American consciousness, and will feature the painting Portefeuille (1946).

"On the Absurd Drama That is Also Life" is open at the Moderna Museet in Malmö through February 23, 2025. The exhibition represents works from a range of artistic media, techniques, and periods, including a number of scheduled performances.  Interweaving humor, provocation, playfulness, seriousness, and theatricality, the works on view challenge notions of sense and logic and highlight the absurdity in everyday life.  Among them is  the lithograph Bâteau bleu (The Grotto) (1950).

"Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design" is open at the Legion of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Legion of Honor through May 11, 2025.  This exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Legion of Honor by showcasing a selection of the Museum’s extensive collection of costume and set designs from ballet’s roots in 15th-century Italy up to present day.  Among the works included is a set design for an unrealized ballet, c. 1950.

JOAN Publishing has re-released Fish Out of Water by Claire-Louise Bennett (first published in 2020 by Juxta Press, Milan, as part of their Words for Portraits series), with the new poem Self-Portrait with Wings by Chloe Aridjis.  Bennett wrote Fish Out of Water in response to seeing Dorothea Tanning's painting Self-Portrait (1944) and a sense of affinity with the artist; Aridjis's piece was written in response to Bennett's text and inspired by Tanning's painting Birthday (1942).

Amy Lyford has published Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life Dorothea Tanning (Reaktion Books, 2023). In this new monograph, Lyford focuses on key examples of Tanning's work in various media from her early Surrealist imagery through her late-career paintings. By discussing them in relation to concurrent topics of 20th-century art, society, and popular culture, and highlighting the artist's own ideas about ways to view her art, including a satirical, fantasy-based, documentary-style film about her paintings, Lyford examines Tanning's singular approach to creating a rich visual experience for the viewer.

Anna Watz has edited a new collection of essays, A History of the Surrealist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2023).  Her essay "The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel" and Catriona McAra's "Feminist-Surrealism in the Contemporary Novel" examine Tanning's novel Chasm: A Weekend, while Katharine Conley's essay "Autobiography" discusses Tanning's memoir Birthday in the context of Surrealist writings. These are among twenty scholarly essays that consider many texts previously left out of critical accounts of the surrealist movement -- texts written by men and women in French, English, Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese, from its emergence in the 1920s and 1930s, through the post-war and postmodern periods, and up to the present moment.

Kasmin Gallery has published the exhibition catalogue Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Paint Say It All?  Both the show and the book take their title from Tanning’s own essay entitled "To Paint," which is included in the publication. This poetic and impassioned text, first published in 1986, describes the artist's creative process and the nature of the medium itself.   The catalogue also explores the artist's unique surrealist practice and the tension between abstraction and figuration in her work through reflections on Tanning’s paintings by three art historians and scholars of surrealism: Mary Ann Caws, Katharine Conley, and Victoria Carruthers.  Hyperallergic nominated the publication as one of "The Best Art Books of 2022."   

Susan L. Power contemplates the motif of doors in her essay "Portes et miroirs dans le monde surconscient de Dorothea Tanning" in the exhibition catalogue SurréAlice: Lewis Carroll et les Surréalistes (Vol. 1 of 2, Strasbourg: Editions des Musées de Strasbourg, 2022, pp. 75-83). The publication explores the Surealists' interest in Carroll's work as a precursor and inspiration to their own.

Victoria Carruthers has published Dorothea Tanning: Transformations (Lund Humphries, 2020). A definitive study of the artist's life and career, this monograph provides a framework within which to consider the range and depth of Tanning's work and her enduring thematic preoccupations. The book is extensively illustrated and features previously unpublished material from interviews that the author conducted with Tanning between 2000 and 2009. Carruthers discusses the book in an interview found here.

We are looking for information about a number of paintings in the effort to fully document Dorothea Tanning's work for a catalogue raisonné. If you have seen any of these paintings, please contact us.

Concerning Wishes (1942)

Le Petit Marquis (1947)

Angel in Mauve and Orange (Study for Anges gardiens) (1947)

Les Infatigables (The Indefatigables) (1965)