Description: Beautifully illustrated with images of Dorothea Tanning's artwork and more, the first--and definitive--study of this important artist's life and creative output.
Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) has for decades been known primarily as a Surrealist, but Exquisite Dreams shows how the work of this passionate, dynamic, and voraciously curious artist is impossible to categorize. Tanning's lesser-known but equally powerful sculptures, abstract paintings, and films are explored here, and her writings, biography, and art are examined in the contexts of twentieth-century developments in advertising, fashion, popular culture, and art in New York and Paris. Using new archival sources and analyses of Tanning's work in a variety of media, Amy Lyford broadens our understanding of the artist and illuminates her stunning diversity and achievement. This richly illustrated book is an important contribution to the history of women artists, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as the history of Surrealism.Brief description: Amy Lyford is the Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is the author of Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France and Isamu Noguchi's Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930-1950.
Review Quotes: "A thoroughly convincing case for the importance of a woman who was considerably more than a Surrealist, the label attached to her from the start of her multifaceted career. . . . Sticking to her subject's work, Lyford puts herself in the best position to illuminate an artist whose complexity would likely frustrate other approaches. . . . Exquisite Dreams offers trenchant observations and analyses as it traces Tanning's career. . . . This book is both a scholar's magnum opus and a lover's report, the result of intensely responsive looking at her subject's work."--Willard Spiegelman "Wall Street Journal"