Tanning exhibition is a complex, satisfying hit

The Mirror, 1950

It only has a week to run, but if you have the chance – and haven’t done so already – then get thee to the Tate Modern in London for the Dorothea Tanning exhibition.

It’s not one of the most massive Tate offerings, so is cheaper than many and nowhere near as exhausting. But don’t mistake that for something that doesn’t pack a punch in its eight rooms.

The Tanning I was familiar with was primarily from the pair of paintings exhibited here that the Tate Modern itself holds: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) and Some Roses and their Phantoms (1952).

But while this starts at around the same era, it goes far later – and there’s plenty of ‘late’, since Tanning’s artistic career panned seven decades and her life, a century plus.

A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today, 1944

Given a background in Galesburg, Illinois, where she observed that nothing happened “except the wallpaper” and a liking for gothic literature, it’s hardly surprising that Tanning was drawn to the imaginative world of Surrealism.

The exhibition opens with 1944’s Endgame, a surreal riff on chess – a game that was popular among the movement’s artists and that Tanning herself described as “more than a game. It’s a way of thinking”.

It’s a work that’s typically meticulous for this stage in her career, but the white stiletto (the queen) crushing the black bishop, and the revealed strip of landscape at the bottom of the canvas, does more than suggest that there’s a lot more going on here than ‘just’ a game a chess.

And that’s one of the major points with the exhibition. There are a number of works here that you could spend ages looking at and still find yourself wondering what they ‘mean’, though Tanning herself seems to have had less concern for interpreting her works than some of those looking at them.

Pour Gustave l’adoré, 1974

A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today from 1944 (pictured left) is one such piece (Ann Radcliffe was an English Gothic author) with it’s sense of moving beyond the physically possible world into a realm without the boundaries of nature.

Open doors are a repeated motif: in the first of Les 7 périls spectraux, a series of lithographs from 1950, Tanning has a door opening in a book, while in Maternity, from 1946-7, a door stands opening in the middle of a desert.

Elsewhere, The Mirror, from 1950 (see top), shows – appears to show – a dead sunflower looking at itself in a sunflower looking glass. Dorian Grey leaps to mind (Tanning loved the book) and Snow White. It’s creepy and compelling.

Over the years, her work became more fluid and abstracted, yet no less mysterious. Pour Gustave l’adoré (1974), shows a mermaid’s tail in the foreground but as our eyes move up, the body is lost in deep shadow. But if that’s a mermaid’s tail, what’s going on just before we’re plunged into shadow: is that a limb to the right and, if so, how does it relate to the tail?

Crepuscula glacial (var., Flos cumuli) from 1997

The title is a play on the name of Paul-Gustave Doré, a 19th-century French engraver and illustrator who was best known for fantastical illustrations of fairy tales.

It’s not difficult to see why Tanning loved his work, but it’s also great to see illustration not regarded as some sort of inferior form of art.

The sense of the mythical, the folkloric and the fairytale is present elsewhere – in Murmers (1976), for instance, and To Climb a Ladder (1987), which has a subtle hint of nightmare about the naked bodies tangled together as they climb.

Tanning turned to poetry late in life, but there’s a poetic quality about some of latest painted works too – not least in the beautifully coloured Crepuscula glacial (var., Flos cumuli) from 1997.

Tweedy, 1973

Some of her soft sculptures are on show and two stick in mind, even for a someone who is not a fan of this approach.

In Tweedy, from 1973, the artist created an animal-like form in tweed, with a small, matching turd near by. It’s very funny.

On the other hand, Hôtel du Pavot, Chamber 202 is deeply unsettling. An installation, the ‘room’ combines soft fabric sculptures with old-style, dark wallpaper, wood and floor.

An open door, though we cannot see through it, offers the only hint of escape as torsos and parts of human forms emerge – in some cases, tearing themselves – through the walls and furniture and into this world.

The wall facing us has a rectangle of wallpaper that’s cleaner and brighter than elsewhere: what picture has been removed and why?

Hôtel du Pavot, Chamber 202, 1970-73

It has a sense of Stephen King’s The Shining – and it’s impossible not to recall Tanning’s own description of her place of upbringing as being where the only thing that happened was the wallpaper. Here, the wallpaper is alive and not in a good way.

Tanning, who was married to Max Ernst for 30 years until his death and very much part of the Surrealist circle of the day, is well served by this fascinating retrospective.

It shines a spotlight on her work, showing us its variety, her humour, her technical skill and – not least – her ability, throughout her career, to create work that, in its unsettling nature, sticks with us long after we’ve left the room.

You have until 9 June – find out more at www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern.