A surrealist ‘little sister’?: Dorothea Tanning’s (femme) Fatala (1947), metaphysical painting, and the roman policier

Abstract

Dorothea Tanning’s painting Fatala (1947) reveals a solitary female figure reaching her hand through a door. This borrows plainly from an artist renowned for rendering women as statues or storefront mannequins: the Greek-born Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose early corpus formed one of Surrealism’s most prominent—and fraught—precedents. Yet Tanning’s canvas also conjures up another of the Surrealists’ elected forebears: Marcel Allain’s series of detective fiction books, titled Fatala: Grand roman policier (1930–31). Co-authored with Pierre Souvestre, Allain’s first series of pulp novels, Fantômas (1911–13),had proven enormously popular in Parisian avant-garde circles, first in the circle of the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire, and later among the Surrealists. Michel Nathan has described Allain’s Fatala as “Fantômas in a walking skirt” (“Fantômas en jupe trotteuse”). This cast-off epithet offers a fitting aegis under which to consider both Tanning’s use of various Surrealist modes in Fatala and their resonance in the context of the movement’s late iterations and sexual politics. For with Fatala, Tanning takes on a higher mathematics of masculine precedent—both Metaphysical painting and the detective novel—as well as their adoption by a host of male Surrealist artists. It is on the male-centered ground of the Metaphysical cityscape and the roman policier that Tanning sets her femme fatale in Fatala, finding in it a readymade stage for the apparition of other identities.