Abstract
Abstract Little girls and young women are Dorothea Tanning’s recurrent archetypes, defining and structuring her conceptual archive concerning gender and the feminine. A celebrated painter and sculptor who shaped her artistic vision in the proximity of the historical avant-gardes, Tanning was also a writer who revealed the mystery and estrangement of family ties in Chasm: A weekend, a novel she started writing in 1943 and published six decades later, in 2004. This singular book offers a privileged dialogue between literature and art, as several episodes revisit and translate the high tension of some of her most representative paintings. From within a feminist framework, the article will discuss aspects of female authority and control in Tanning’s novel as dominant forms of female empowerment, present throughout her visual Surrealist oeuvre. I argue that examining these allegories reveals their role as connectors between the literary and the visual arts, between Dorothea Tanning’s fiction and her painting.
Highlights
Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealist art is a celebration of the female element affirming its extremes: precociousness in childhood, deviant adolescence, violent, irrational unpredictability, sexual freedom
The American artist shaped her creativity under the strong influence of the 1936 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
She briefly worked in commercial art, but once she met European artists seeking refuge from the war, she became acquainted with important names of the avantgarde, including Max Ernst
Summary
Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealist art is a celebration of the female element affirming its extremes: precociousness in childhood, deviant adolescence, violent, irrational unpredictability, sexual freedom. This article will consider the unifying vision in which Tanning integrates her vast gallery of autonomous, self-contained, mysterious and intangible female characters, establishing her own version of the Surrealist revolutionary project Their authority derives from their empowerment as bearers of meaning separate and independent from the opposite sex. Though, is clearly oriented towards problematizing the feminine and its representations in art and literature This overlapping of artistic dialects amplifies the depth of the surreal territory on which Tanning articulated her vision of female authority and empowerment. Once again, Tanning’s choice to place a little girl in a leading role challenges the notion of femininity and female power by subverting the idea of a definitive and complete, mature identity This reminds us of Julia Kristeva’s theorizing of adolescence in The Adolescent Novel where she tackles the notion as part of a psychoanalytic framework. Applied to a literary text, the notion of female empowerment I use is essentially rooted in this definition
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