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Lot Essay
Filled with an enigmatic play of form and internal dynamism, The Moonstone Effect is a vivid expression of Dorothea Tanning’s atmospheric painterly language. Having initially been drawn to Surrealism following a visit to the ground-breaking 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the mid-1950s Tanning began to move increasingly towards a more abstracted style of painting, eschewing the unsettling realism of her earlier work and instead favouring loose, delicate passages of colour and light to bring her imaginary, dream-like worlds into being. ‘Around 1955, my canvases literally splintered,’ she explained. ‘Their colours came out of the closet, you might say, to open the rectangles to a different light. They were prismatic, surfaces where I veiled, suggested and floated my persistent icons and preoccupations, in another of the thousand ways of saying the same things’ (D. Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 178). Nevertheless, the figure remained a central protagonist within these scenes, glimpsed amidst the hazy layers of colour, often metamorphosing into hybrid creatures or fantastical characters.
Discussing this shift within her work, Tanning described the appeal of such amorphous imagery, its ability to captivate the eye and reveal different things each time a viewer encountered it: ‘I wanted to make a picture that you didn’t see all at once. All of my pictures of this period I felt you should discover slowly and that they would almost be kaleidoscopes that would shimmer and that you would discover something new every time you looked at it’ (D. Tanning, quoted in Dorothea Tanning: Exhibition Guide, Tate Modern, London, 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/dorothea-tanning/exhibition-guide, accessed 18 December 2022). In The Moonstone Effect, a pair of amorphous beings slowly come into view, their contours invoking a subtle sense of eroticism. Shortly after its completion, the present work was purchased by William and Noma Copley, who were close friends of Tanning and her husband Max Ernst, and it remained in their collection for over forty years. The painting was later re-purchased by the artist around 2005 and reintegrated into her personal collection, at which point Tanning took it upon herself to alter the composition and rename it The Moonstone Effect.
Discussing this shift within her work, Tanning described the appeal of such amorphous imagery, its ability to captivate the eye and reveal different things each time a viewer encountered it: ‘I wanted to make a picture that you didn’t see all at once. All of my pictures of this period I felt you should discover slowly and that they would almost be kaleidoscopes that would shimmer and that you would discover something new every time you looked at it’ (D. Tanning, quoted in Dorothea Tanning: Exhibition Guide, Tate Modern, London, 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/dorothea-tanning/exhibition-guide, accessed 18 December 2022). In The Moonstone Effect, a pair of amorphous beings slowly come into view, their contours invoking a subtle sense of eroticism. Shortly after its completion, the present work was purchased by William and Noma Copley, who were close friends of Tanning and her husband Max Ernst, and it remained in their collection for over forty years. The painting was later re-purchased by the artist around 2005 and reintegrated into her personal collection, at which point Tanning took it upon herself to alter the composition and rename it The Moonstone Effect.