Overview

The life and times of one of our most enchanting artists; a twentieth-century fairy tale, lovingly remembered and luminously told. Fourteen years ago, the artist Dorothea Tanning published Birthday, a collection of reminiscences. Now she has expanded it into a memoir of her journey through the last century as confidant, collaborator, and muse to some of its most inspired minds and personalities: a diverse assemblage that ranges from the fathers of dada and surrealism to Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, Joan Miró, James Merrill, and many more. At its center is the relationship, tenderly rendered, between Tanning and her famed husband, the enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst. Whether recalling the poignant presence of her friend Joseph Cornell or simply marveling at the facades along a Venice canal, ""their filmy reflections fluttering in the dirty canal like fragile altar cloths hung out to dry,"" Tanning's writing is beguiling, wry, and shot through with the same eye for pregnant detail and immanent magic that marks her art.

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Reviews

A mix of acidic critique, clear-eyed remembrance, and funny, name-dropping anecdotes, this autobiography offers a glimpse of the creative process and reveals some of the sacrifices required of an ambitious, creative woman wed to a more famous man. --Village Voice In buoyant and electric prose, laced with wit and leavened with ungrudging generosity, Dorothea Tanning has given us in this memoir a brilliant account of the fizz and panache of a truly remarkable life: Stravinsky provides her wedding champagne; Andre Malraux upstages Orson Welles; J. Robert Oppenheimer turns up at Les Deux Magots; and the gentle and enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning's husband, is the presiding spirit. --Anthony Hecht Tanning's . . . beguiling memoir chronicles her small-town Midwestern girlhood and travels through the postwar art worlds of New York and Paris, where she collaborated with George Balanchine on ballet sets and spent decades reconfiguring female anatomy in delirious nudes. --Vogue

Tanning's . . . beguiling memoir chronicles her small-town Midwestern girlhood and travels through the postwar art worlds of New York and Paris, where she collaborated with George Balanchine on ballet sets and spent decades reconfiguring female anatomy in delirious nudes. -- Vogue <br>

In buoyant and electric prose, laced with wit and leavened with ungrudging generosity, Dorothea Tanning has given us in this memoir a brilliant account of the fizz and panache of a truly remarkable life: Stravinsky provides her wedding champagne; Andre Malraux upstages Orson Welles; J. Robert Oppenheimer turns up at Les Deux Magots; and the gentle and enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning's husband, is the presiding spirit. --Anthony Hecht A mix of acidic critique, clear-eyed remembrance, and funny, name-dropping anecdotes, this autobiography offers a glimpse of the creative process and reveals some of the sacrifices required of an ambitious, creative woman wed to a more famous man. --Village Voice Tanning's . . . beguiling memoir chronicles her small-town Midwestern girlhood and travels through the postwar art worlds of New York and Paris, where she collaborated with George Balanchine on ballet sets and spent decades reconfiguring female anatomy in delirious nudes. --Vogue

""A mix of acidic critique, clear-eyed remembrance, and funny, name-dropping anecdotes, this autobiography offers a glimpse of the creative process and reveals some of the sacrifices required of an ambitious, creative woman wed to a more famous man."" --Village Voice ""In buoyant and electric prose, laced with wit and leavened with ungrudging generosity, Dorothea Tanning has given us in this memoir a brilliant account of the fizz and panache of a truly remarkable life: Stravinsky provides her wedding champagne; Andre Malraux upstages Orson Welles; J. Robert Oppenheimer turns up at Les Deux Magots; and the gentle and enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning's husband, is the presiding spirit."" --Anthony Hecht ""Tanning's . . . beguiling memoir chronicles her small-town Midwestern girlhood and travels through the postwar art worlds of New York and Paris, where she collaborated with George Balanchine on ballet sets and spent decades reconfiguring female anatomy in delirious nudes."" --Vogue

Author Information

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois. Her paintings and sculptures rank among the msot inventive works of any living American artist and can be found in numerous collections, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and many others. She is also the author of Birthday (Lapis Press, 1986), and her poetry has appeared in Parnassus, Yale Review, Paris Review, and Ploughshares and was included in The Best Poetry 2000.

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