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Lot Essay
In the early 1950s, Dorothea Tanning relocated to France with her husband Max Ernst, settling first in Paris, before moving to the small hamlet of Huismes in the Loire Valley. During this decade, Tanning’s approach to painting shifted dramatically, moving away from the mysterious, hyper-real scenes which had previously dominated her work, to embrace a more abstract aesthetic, rooted in colour, light and movement. ‘Gradually, in looking at how many ways paint can flow onto canvas, I began to long for letting it have more freedom,’ she explained. ‘Beginning, roughly in 1955, after a period of painting direct, simple images as statement (Tableau Vivant; The Blue Waltz; Death and the Maiden...), my painted compositions began to shift and merge in an ever intensifying complexity of planes. Colour was now a first prerogative… I wanted to lead the eye into spaces that hid, revealed, transformed all at once and where there would be some never-before-seen image, as if it had appeared with no help from me’ (D. Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, pp. 213-214).
There is a lyricism to the movement in Tanning’s canvases of this period, the fields of pigment flowing into one another with a dynamism that goes beyond the gestural act of painting, perhaps influenced by her experiences designing costumes and sets for the ballet. In Visit jaune (Visite éclair) rich skeins of pigment fill the canvas, their cloud-like forms exhibiting an almost vaporous quality as they bleed into and across one another in subtly shifting layers. The richly variegated expanse of yellow is punctuated by pockets of soft umber, bright orange and scarlet, while at the centre a cloud of darker pigment swirls, like a chasm cutting the length of the canvas and splintering outwards. While at first seemingly formless, there appears to be an underpinning of figuration within this central section, with certain elements recalling the soft flesh of distorted or fragmented bodies, briefly glimpsed through the mist.
There is a lyricism to the movement in Tanning’s canvases of this period, the fields of pigment flowing into one another with a dynamism that goes beyond the gestural act of painting, perhaps influenced by her experiences designing costumes and sets for the ballet. In Visit jaune (Visite éclair) rich skeins of pigment fill the canvas, their cloud-like forms exhibiting an almost vaporous quality as they bleed into and across one another in subtly shifting layers. The richly variegated expanse of yellow is punctuated by pockets of soft umber, bright orange and scarlet, while at the centre a cloud of darker pigment swirls, like a chasm cutting the length of the canvas and splintering outwards. While at first seemingly formless, there appears to be an underpinning of figuration within this central section, with certain elements recalling the soft flesh of distorted or fragmented bodies, briefly glimpsed through the mist.