The epigraph to A Table of Content, Dorothea Tanning’s 2004 collection of poems, reads, “It’s hard to be always the same person.” The quote is attributed to Montaigne, but it could have just as easily come from Tanning herself. When she died in 2012 at the age of 101, the artist left behind a body of work that included Surrealist and abstract paintings, prints, drawings, costume designs, fabric sculptures, installations, collage, and writings. It’s not so much that she defied easy categorization, but that for eight decades, she refused to be always the same artist, repeatedly pursuing new ways of expressing the unconscious.
Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning brings together 19 collaged works, most of which date from the late 1980s. Tanning had already published the first of her two memoirs and was increasingly turning to literary pursuits. The collages, with their scraps of fabric, tissue, paper, watercolor, and ink, can give the sense that the artist picked up past works’ detritus from her studio floor and decided she might as well make art out of it. Largely abstract, with a few figurative elements (the artist’s hands, cats’ paws, a faucet, a bicycle), the pieces serve to ignite viewers’ imaginations and encourage them to fashion their own interpretations.
There’s a certain sensual, otherworldly quality that pervades her work. In “Table of Contents” (all works 1988 unless noted), an oval swatch of fabric printed with cat paws and legs is glued on top of the crinkled, translucent white tissue of a tablecloth and flanked by black paper silhouettes of a fork and knife. A gray arrow points down at the uncanny place setting from the top of the frame, against a background of pale pink, goldenrod, and blue-gray torn paper abstractions, some resembling a reaching tentacle or branch, or even a human limb. Why is this cat being served for dinner, and what creature is poised to partake of it? Perhaps it is the stuff of nightmares, or maybe the meal is symbolic of some interior struggle — Tanning gives us only the wordplay of the title.
This spirit of playfulness imbues the collages’ imaginative realms. Using a restrained but elegant palette of muted blue, gray, black, burgundy, peach, and pistachio (sometimes with striking patches of yellow and orange), Tanning softly built up layers of material to create a pleasing movement and visual lyricism, even as the amorphous forms refuse to settle into a narrative. In “Garden with Gardeners,” the black and white photocopy of a hand placed atop what appears to be rubber bands is covered in a flurry of small, torn papers. Are the gardeners trying to cover something up with their plantings?
The show’s stunning five-panel titular work, “Encyclopedia” (1990–95), initiates a dreamlike sequence with a black silhouette of a water faucet in the upper left corner of the first panel. White tissue paper flows and splashes from the faucet, then seems to morph into flickers of fire as it dances to a tumbling black bicycle and various human and animal figures in the following panels. The spare outline of an upturned chair punctuates the top right of the final panel. This detail forms the cover of my paperback edition of Table of Contents, which includes Tanning’s poem “Collage (La Femme 100 Têtes).” In it, she writes, “Conjured scenario: scissor scheme explodes./How else to float your favorite chair/among the waves, then sit in it?/…/A door somewhere unfolds.” Tanning’s practice shows that there is always another door to open, a new world to explore, and that, when life sometimes feels ridden with obstacles and dead ends, art offers us another possible existence.
Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning continues at Kasmin Gallery (297 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) through October 24. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
