Dorothea Tanning: Insomnias 1954-1965

Dorothea Tanning, who was born in 1910 in Galesburg, a town on the Illinois prairie, is one of America€s major surrealist artists. She first came to fame in the 1940s when she showed in the gallery of Julien Levy, New York€s preeminent dealer of surrealism. However, in the 1950s she felt a growing need to move beyond the prevailing idiom of surrealist representation. She describes what happened: €œAround 1955 my canvases literally splintered . . . I broke the mirror, you might say.€ The resulting paintings are vibrant with faceted colors and shifting spaces. The Insomnias €" the group takes its name from a painting of the same title that Tanning made in 1957 €" are forays into the realm of conjured energies; they represent a vigorous expansion of form and content at a crucial historical moment that continues to reverberate today. Charles Stuckey describes these €œseemingly multidimensional mindspaces€ as €œamong the most ambitious and sophisticated paintings to address the dilemmas of imagination and culture in a new atomic, space-race age.€