EDINBURGH.- A captivating painting by Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), created at a turning-point in her career and kept in her possession for the remainder of her exceptionally long life, has become the first of the artist’s works to enter Scotland’s national art collection, the National Galleries of Scotland announced today.

One of the world’s greatest collections of Surrealist art now welcomes Tableau Vivant, an outstanding painting with a rich and fascinating history. It has been purchased with help from Art Fund and the Henry and Sula Walton Fund and follows the Galleries’ acquisition of major artworks by Surrealists Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. It will go on immediate display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA).

Tableau Vivant, painted by Tanning nearly sixty years ago, featured in the artist’s first exhibition in France at the Galerie Furstenberg, Dorothea Tanning: Peintures 1949-1954 (7-30 May 1954). Tanning had inscribed the title L’Etreinte on the verso, which can be translated as ‘The Embrace’ or conversely ‘The Grip’ or ‘The Stranglehold’. A few months later it was crossed out and substituted with Tableau Vivant. Under its new title, Tableau Vivant was included in the artist’s first exhibition in Britain, at the Arthur Jeffress gallery, London in 1955.

In the late 1940s and 1950s in Paris, Tanning made her first etchings in the printmaking studio of Georges Visat. Here, she began to introduce the image of the giant dog, Katchina, who belonged to her and her husband, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst (1891-1976). Numerous Surrealist artists took animal avatars which play the role of alter-ego in their work: Ernst took a bird, Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) chose a horse; Tanning took Katchina. Unlike most artists’ avatars, Tanning’s was a specific animal – her own pet. Moreover, Katchina appears in Tanning’s work, not necessarily as an embodiment of the artist; sometimes witness, sometimes protagonist, the dog assumes different roles in different works. These pieces marked Tanning’s shift away from the meticulous, controlled, illustrative technique which was the hallmark of her Surrealist work. Instead, she began to opt for a much looser, softer, more painterly brushwork and her colour switched from bright, intense primaries to ashes and ochres.

An elliptical comment on power, love, the erotic, the humorous, the dream and the nightmare, Tableau Vivant unites key moments in the artist’s life and career. It was a painting that Tanning held very dear and it was included in virtually every major show of her work, notably her solo shows in Brussels in 1967, Paris in 1974, and the Malmö Konsthall and Camden Art Centre in 1993. She kept it for the remainder of her life until 2012, when she died at the age of 101, nearly sixty years after painting it. Towards the end of her life, she specified it as one of a small number of works reserved only for sale to a museum. It was purchased through the Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Speaking of the acquisition, Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland said: “We’ve been looking for a major painting by Dorothea Tanning for many years. This was one of her favourite works: she kept it for more than sixty years, hanging it above her desk in her apartment in New York. It’s a stunning addition to the Galleries’ world-famous collection of Surrealist art.”

Sarah Philp, Director of Programme and Policy at Art Fund, said: “Tableau Vivant is an astonishing work with a fascinating biography and we are proud to help National Galleries of Scotland purchase this painting for their outstanding Surrealist art collection.”

Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Gaelsburg, a provincial town in Illinois, to Swedish parents. She left home in 1930 for Chicago, and briefly attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Art but was largely self-taught, before settling in New York in 1935. The exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the next year, had a profound effect upon her. She earned her living at the time as a commercial artist, producing magazine advertisements, but also began painting in a Surrealist manner. She visited Paris in August 1939 armed, she recalled, with letters of introduction to Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí, but by the time she arrived they had all fled the city ahead of the outbreak of the Second World War that September.

In 1941 Julien Levy signed Tanning on for his gallery, which specialised in Surrealist art. It was there that she came to the attention of Peggy Guggenheim who was, at the time, organising an exhibition of thirty women artists, to be held at her newly-opened Art of this Century gallery in New York. Amongst the advisors for the exhibition was Guggenheim’s then husband Max Ernst, who visited Tanning’s studio in 1942. Tanning was a late addition to the show, now titled Exhibition by 31 Women, which opened in January 1943. Ernst moved in with Tanning shortly after. Guggenheim later lamented that she should have kept the number of artists in her exhibition to thirty. When she and Ernst separated, Guggenheim recalls, ‘Max rushed downstairs and seized our dog Kachina from my arms as though she were the child in a divorce.’ Taking this Lhasa Apso terrier with him to live with Tanning, Katchina (sometimes spelt Kachina) was to become a recurrent motif in Tanning’s art, even appearing in her later works, long after the dog’s death.

First appearing in Maternity (1946-47), where she lay at the feet of a mother-and-child group and was given a child’s face, Katchina also featured sporadically in other paintings from around that time. Across 1953-54, however, Katchina featured prominently in almost every one of Tanning’s works. In a 1953 etching, the giant dog was imaged dancing a tango with a naked woman. A second etching with aquatint, Red Drama (1954), takes the scene a step further: here the dog seems to dominate the woman. In The Blue Waltz and Tableau Vivant (both 1954) Tanning’s brushwork is looser, more painterly, and her palette is muted. These works – both the etchings and the paintings – impart a commentary on relationships and absurdity, and part of their appeal lies in their ambiguity: each presents an unclear power dynamic.