The Doors of Imperception:The Art of Dorothea Tanning.

"A very little key will open a very heavy door" - Charles Dickens, Hunted Down (1859).

Dorothea Tanning loved doors. At times it seems she loved doors even more than she loved dogs - and she really loved dogs. Not least her lhasa apso, Katchina, who crops up regularly in Tanning's work, often as a cipher for Tanning herself. But not as often as doors. Doors are everywhere. Doors that open into nothingness, doors that open to reveal our subconscious desires, closed doors. open doors, doors ajar, doors indoors, and doors outdoors. In one instance she didn't just paint doors but painted on a door.

It's not so much as one door closes, another one opens. More as one door opens it reveals an infinite amount of further doors. It's not a big surprise that Tanning should use this particular trope in her art. Salvador Dali had his clocks and his elephants, Magritte his apples and bowler hats, and Giorgio de Chirico his rubber gloves and faceless mannequins. The surrealists loved nothing more than to thread a theme through their life's work.

What's more surprising is that Dorothea Tanning came from a small town in Illinois, Galesburg (pop 32,193), with no artistic heritage and from a family with no interest in art. Her father, she informs us in a short film you can watch at the end of her current Tate Modern retrospective could draw a pretty mean horse. But that's because he liked horses. Not because he liked art!

The Magic Flower Game (1941)

Across her seventy year career, Tanning died in 2012 in Manhattan at the ripe old age of 101, his daughter certainly proved she could make art. In true surrealist fashion she claimed, as you can read in the first room of this fine exhibition, "I wanted to lead the eye into spaces that hid, revealed, transformed all at one and where there could be some never-before-seen-image".

I'd say she succeeded in that. As a young artist in New York in the 1930s she was turned on by the surreal artists of Paris but her art was no mere copy of European styles. She stamped it very clearly with her own identity.

Deirdre (1940)

A Very Happy Picture (1947)

L'Auberge (1949)

The show's not arranged in strict chronological order which means you can take more of a top down view of Tanning's work, as opposed to a narrative consideration. It means fairly straightforward portraiture like 1940's Deirdre can hang in the same room as 1947's A Very Happy Picture, something of a maelstrom that looks like Dali and Duchamp involved in some high level game of consequences, and 1949's more subdued L'Auberge with Katchina making her first appearance alongside some jazzy free association squiggles and symbols.

Despite these differences, Tanning saw "no break or detour, even temporary" in her paintings. Each one was "a step on the same road", a road that took her away from Galesburg, a town she dismissed as a place where "nothing happened but the wallpaper". Gothic novels and poetry were her gateway drugs into the art world and she travelled to, first, Chicago and then New York to pursue her dream. It was in the Big Apple, at MOMA, she saw the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism and three years later she was on a boat to Paris to surround herself with that city's world leading art scene.

She wasn't there long. The outbreak of World War II meant Tanning soon returned to New York and this time some of the European artists, now cultural refugees, came with her. One of these, Max Ernst, was to become her husband. Paintings of chess games signify her relationship with both Ernst and other leading surrealist figures. Apparently!

Tanning worked as a freelance illustrator, making designs for Macy's, she contributed artwork to VVV (a US publication for European artists displaced by WWII) and Zero (which was made available in the disparate territories of France, Mexico, and Morocco), she made friends with Marcel Duchamp, and when she married Ernst it was a joint ceremony in which Man Ray also got hitched to Juliet Browner, a dancer, model, and, ffs, muse!

In a vitrine case you can ponder Duchamp's and Man Ray's postcards to Tanning and Ernst, photographs of chess tournaments, and a brochure for Tanning's first solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1944. The same year she painted A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today.

The years up to, and including, 1944, the war years, seem to be the most fruitful period of Tanning's entire career. It's when she made many of her most iconic works. She spoke of gothic novels permeated with a "mist of mysterious and unpredictable atmospheres", of places she didn't know about, and a mood of longing and displacement and she contrived to appropriate this in her paintings.

A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today (1944)

Bateau bleu (The Grotto) (1950)

Birthday (1942)

1942's Birthday is particularly spellbinding - and not just because it's got some boobs in it. It's a self-portrait - of sorts. Tanning wears a 'theatrical' jacket open to reveal her breasts and a skirt infested with a swarm of tiny critters. At her feet stands a larger, more imposing, creature and behind her doors stretch out into infinity. It was the painting Ernst saw on her easel when he first met Tanning and it was Ernst who suggested the title to mark Tanning's 'birth' as a surreal artist.

More than forty years later doors weren't just populating her paintings, they were providing the 'canvas'. There's an almost William Blake level of colour and intensity to Door 84, inspired perhaps by her move, with Ernst, to Arizona where the desert was so hot she'd lock the doors (doors again) to escape the intensity of heat for much of the day.

Door 84 (1984)

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943)

It's not as if her work had, prior to that, lacked intensity. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, named for a Mozart composition, is probably her most well known painting. She described it as "a confrontation between the forces of grown-up logic and the bottomless psyche of a child" and it has to be said, that seems a fairly accurate description.

Hair defies gravity, flowers defy nature, and the girl in the red blouse's face is not properly attached to her head like some uncannily horrific mask. In the background there are, of course, a row of closed doors. Behind them lurks whatever our waking selves like to keep in our subconscious. If you're imagining good things, you're not trying hard enough. 

Children's Games (1942)

Self-Portrait (1944)

These eerie child protagonists seem to have first cropped up in 1942's Children's Games, stripping paper off walls to reveal a hitherto concealed inferno, but while these pictures are somewhat claustrophobic, a 1944 Self-Portrait takes another tack entirely. My friend Alex has been particularly interested in this painting ever since I shared a picture on a blog I wrote about a visit to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art with another close friend, Owen, in 2016. She found it freaky, uncanny, but I think it's safe to say she also loved it.

A small figure, Tanning herself, stares out into a vast desert, Arizona, wilderness like a scaled down Caspar David Friedrich in 1818's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. We see how nature dwarfs humanity, how the immensity of the Earth is almost beyond our comprehension, and we feel both fear and comfort. It's terrifying to think how exposed we truly our to the elements, the vicissitudes, and the violence of life but it's also comforting to know that we are not so much passive observers of nature but that we are part of it. I'm sure that's why it feels so good to walk barefoot in the sand, to swim in the sea, and to fall asleep in a park on a sunny day.

The Guest Room is disconcerting in a whole different way but it's equally brilliant. Tanning really lets rip with her imagination here. This girl is not looking out at nature but, instead, finds herself in a scene that looks very unnatural. Tanning admired how gothic fiction "showed what was actually happening under the tedium of daily life" but I'm not sure that even Horace Walpole or Mary Shelley gave rein to such wild and whimsical thoughts as Tanning has here.

Let's take a while to take in what's happening. Behind the drapery, suggesting this scene, these desires, are usually hidden, a sleepyhead cuddles up to a wooden, expressionless, mannequin. Behind that a hooded figure stares eerily out at us - despite seemingly being faceless. In the foreground, a naked girl on the cusp of puberty and a midget in ostentatious cowboy boots and face covering stand near to a table of eggs that have all been cracked open. There is, of course, a door. The naked girl leans against it and on the other side a shadowy figure with a bandaged upper head either hides or, more worryingly, waits. What the fuck does it all mean?

The Guest Room (1950-2)

I have no idea whatsoever but I do know that I absolutely love it. 1954's Portrait de famille (Tanning had pretentiously taken to using French titles by this point) isn't quite as bizarre, not much is, but it's still a little odd. Katchina's on good form in the foreground, begging for goodies, but it's the besuited, bespectacled, tie wearing father figure who takes a split second to come into focus. He's both four times as large as everyone else and spectral. He's both absent and a constant overwhelming presence at the same time. Like some rubbish fathers we've all met.

Portrait de famille (Family Portrait) (1954)

Le Truite au bleu (Poached Trout) (1952)

Musical Chairs (1951)

Notes for an Apocalypse (1978)

Elsewhere, we meet with a pleading trout on a white tablecloth, we see an almost abstracted game of Musical Chairs, and Tanning's inner Blake comes out once more in 1978's Notes for an Apocalypse. Again, a white tablecloth appears (symbolising, so we're told, domestic order) but beneath the order all is turbulence. The Philosophers, too, twist and turn and refuse to resolve, for us, into a composition we can get our heads round. 

Tanning is not so much departing the surrealist movement but drilling down on it and using it to refract her childhood memories. As a girl in Galesburg, the white tablecloth would come out on a Sunday when the pastor visited for dinner. Its gridlike pattern denoting an orderly household and one that would please both pastor and God.

The Philosophers (1952)

Some Roses and Their Phantoms (1952)

Yet other, unknown, forces were at play. Both in Tanning's art and, in Some Roses and Their Phantoms, on that tablecloth. At this point, Tanning claimed she thought she had "gone over to a place where one no longer faces identities at all". The surrealism of her earlier work was blurring into an abstraction, her brushwork was becoming looser, colour and light took over from subject matter and details, yet she never completely discarded figuration. 

Sometimes her works can be seen to be precursors of magic eye painting or even Where's Wally? You look for a while at what appears to be an abstract painting before the picture gradually unfolds in front of you. There's a face at the centre of 1957's Insomnies that is not immediately apparent but one which once you've seen it you can hardly imagine you'd ever not seen it. An eccentricty of the human incapacity for metacognition that I was only learning about with the London Fortean Society (also, like Tate Modern, in SE1) a fortnight ago.

Insomnies (Insomnias) (1957)

Pour Gustave l'adore (1974)

Touristes de Prague III (Tourists of Prague III) (1961)

The abstraction/figuration hybrid turns pretty dark in 1974's homage to Gustave Dore, and Tourists de Prague III is an inky wash that resembles nothing less than the smudged Rorschach test of a sexually ambiguous and jaded colonel. The stage designs that Tanning produced with choreographer George Balanchine, she described her first encounter with him (in 1945) as 'momentous', are not short of a sexual charge either. Repressed or overt.

Alongside ornate animal and boat headdresses for masquerade balls, Tanning sought to capture "joie de vivre, elegant gestures, lots of superstition and (she hoped) some savagery". 1969's Etreinte seems to have caught its ill defined protagonists in an incongruent act of congress. Or are they merely indulging in some light-hearted horseplay? Are those two things even that different?

Etreinte (1969)

A Guest (1945)

Tango (1989)

Meme les jeunes filles (Even the Young Girls) (1966)

Meme les jeunes filles is a carnival, an orgy even perhaps, of bodies in bright and bold colours but Emma doesn't look so comfortable, a touch of bondage maybe, and the stooping hero of De quel amour, a Giacometti that's let himself go, is chained to a post. As if his moral self and his carnal self make such uneasy bedfellows he's (and I do see it as a him in this case) stuck in an eternal stand-off between satisfying his desire for liberty and sating his lust.

Poor fella. Dorothea Tanning made no apologies for her obsession with the human, often naked, form and why should she? We are enveloped in our skin for our entire time on Earth, we are saddled with our desires, proclivities, and peccadilloes from a very young age. Repression of desire seems a fool's errand so why not embrace it in all its fucked up, multitudinous, and logic defying ways. If you're not hurting anyone else (or even if you are but that person is up for it) and you wanna get your rocks off, get your rocks off. Life's short.

Emma (1970)

De quel amour (By What Love) (1970)

Tanning's 'soft sculptures' are, for the most part more sensuous, more erotic, than her paintings. Stuffed with wool, filled with table tennis balls, pins, and pieces of jigsaw puzzles they straddle the gap between object and being as well as, and I steal directly from the information board here - because I agree with it, simultaneously appearing both playful and sinister. Like all the best toys.

Cousins (1970)

Portrait de famille (Family Portrait) (1977)

Tweedy (1973)

1973's Tweedy features some kind of vague animal made of tweed and just to give it that extra something, Tanning has also created a tiny little turd from the same material. 

Pincushions are converted into instruments of ritualistic and fetishistic value. Plush media like black velvet tempt us in to an enticing world yet it's a world where vaginal cushions have sharp teeth and pins protrude from the most innocent looking surfaces. Some of this art is great. Some, Traffic Sign particularly, not so. Considering how good most of Tanning's work is it seems churlish to complain about a lazy idea executed badly but, fortunately, it's a rare misstep in a very long career.

To Climb a Ladder (1987)

Pincushion to Serve as Fetish (1979)

Traffic Sign (1970)

Verbe (1969-70)

We're all allowed a bad day at the office, in 1978's Stanza featuring a 'tortured' poet hunched over a typewriter churning out what we assume to be doggerel, Tanning even depicted one. But there is way more good than there is bad in Dorothea Tanning's portfolio and in Tate Modern's consideration of it.

One room I absolutely adored was the one dedicated to 'MATERNITIES'. Odd as I'm not a mother, not even a parent (if anything, these blogs and the walks I organise are the closest I'll get to any form of 'legacy') but obviously I know parents. I even have two. Hotel du Pavot, Chambre 202 takes up most of the room and is one of the most eye catching things in the entire show.

Stanza (1978)

Hotel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970-3)

A crimson hotel room has been invaded by otherworldly mannequins. They're sat on the sofa, they're slumped over the table, and they're even coming through the walls - like arms in Polanski's Repulsion a lustrum earlier. Lit by a single bulb, no lampshade, it's an image both inviting and discomfiting. It speaks to deeply held desires that both excite and repulse us and it's a great photo op for many exhibition visitors.

But, for me, Maternity (made more than two decades earlier) resonates even more. Of course there are doors, one open to reveal sails in the shape of the female reproductive organs, and Katchina puts in an appearance too - this time with a human face. The sands are so golden as to be unreal, the horizon is just that little bit too high, and yet in the foreground a scene that could have taken place at any time in human history. A mother holds her child in a warm embrace.

In the midst of all the insanity, all the repressed desires, all the explicit desires, all the dogs, all the doors, all the tableclothes, and all the broken eggs one thing is ever present. A love for humanity. Dorothea Tanning's art may look weird, it may be dark in places, and occasionally plain bonkers - but underneath it all beats a human heart of great compassion. It's why the art's still relevant today. With that, I left the gallery. Closing the door behind me.

Maternity (1946-7)