"Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning" is on view at Kasmin in New York through October 26, 2024. Celebrating the multidisciplinary spirit of Tanning’s oeuvre, the show concentrates on Tanning’s late-career collages from the 1980s and 1990s and feature Encyclopedia (1990-1995), a mural-scale, five-panel collage that represents the culmination of Tanning’s collage practice and is exhibited here for the first time in its entirety.

"Immersive Worlds: Real and Imagined" is on view at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire through December 15, 2024.  Drawn from the Hood Museum’s permanent collection, the artworks featured were created after 1950 using a range of artistic processes, including assemblage, printmaking, painting, and ceramic and wood sculpture. The exhibition invites multi-sensory, personal, immersive exploration through a creative writing space, an opt-in scent station, and original poems by local poets commissioned specifically for this exhibition, and features the painting To the Rescue (1965).

"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 Mapfré 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.

"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).

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)