In 1943, the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim organized in her New York gallery, The art of this century, one of the first exhibitions in the United States in which work by women, both European and North American, was fully exhibited and presented under the title Exhibition of 31 women. The exhibition was designed by Peggy in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, and the selection of artists was entrusted to a jury whose members included important surrealist artists of the day such as André Breton, Max Ernst and Duchamp himself.
The work of these women, linked above all to surrealism and abstraction, and where we find names like Leonora Carrington, Gypsy Rose Lee or Frida Khalo, was present in this exhibition with little media impact. The quote aroused the interest of some art critics only to attack it; but it nevertheless shows – once again – Peggy’s broad artistic sense, which goes beyond simple interest and pleasure in the present. “This initiative will only fulfill its purpose if it serves the future rather than documenting the past,” Peggy said in a 1942 press release.
The spirit of this 1943 exhibition organized in New York can now be found at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, under the title 31 women. A Peggy Guggenheim exhibition, which includes not only the works of great female artists, but also the connection between them and how they relate to Peggy, as well as the fundamental role of female collectors in the future of art. All works in the Madrid exhibition belong to Jenna Segal, art collector and Broadway producer.
One of the women present at the 1940s exhibition was Dorothea Tanning (Illinois – New York. 1910 – 2012), an artist linked to surrealism and chosen by Ernst – married to Peggy – after meeting her in her studio and playing a game with her. chess, a discipline that Tanning loved very much.
The paintings that moved from Tanning’s studio to Peggy’s gallery were Child’s Play (1942) And Birthday (1942). A self-portrait of the author with bare breasts, an inexplicable dress, a winged creature at her feet and several half-open doors. Breton wrote about Tanning and said that “her work remains ajar, like a door that the viewer wants to enter and she encourages him.”
The self-portrait and open doors will be two recurring elements in Tanning’s work, always linked to dreaminess, with the intention of separating public spaces from intimate spaces. “An open door leads to the imagination, one realizes that it is an enigmatic and very wholesome thing, it encourages the viewer to look beyond the obvious and the vulgar,” thought Tanning.
The Illinois artist fell in love with surrealism after attending Alfred H. Barr’s groundbreaking exhibition: Fantasy art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. After this revelation, in July 1939, he boarded the Nieuw Amsterdam and left for France with a suitcase full of letters of recommendation for Tanguy, Ernst, Picasso, etc. and a little money. A little more. The outbreak of World War II sent Tanning back to New York, not yet knowing that there would soon be a mass exodus of artists and intellectuals to the United States, making the country the new epicenter of art and intellectuality, to the detriment of devastated populations. Old Continent for war.
She painted in her Manhattan studio and in 1941 one of her great opportunities presented itself: being selected by Ernst, through the gallery owner who represented the surrealists in New York, Julian Levy, for the exhibition Exhibition of 31 women in Peggy’s gallery. But this appointment changed much more than his artistic and intellectual life. It opened the doors to the elite of the moment, led by an independent, daring and millionaire woman who had a space dedicated to irreverent and provocative art, and who was called to artistic revolution. Not only because of the works he exhibited, but also the way he exhibited them. The design of the room was by Frederick Kiesler and the works were displayed in the air.
The meeting with Ernst not only plunged Tanning into the circle of exiled artists from Europe, it also transformed her personal life because shortly after the exhibition of women artists, she and Ernst married during a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliette Browner, and they will live far from the gossip of New York, a city dominated more by the name of Guggenheim than by that of Ernst.
Guggenheim would state in his memoirs, Out of this century, confessions of an art addictthat Ernst “worked a lot for this exhibition”. “In any case, he loved this profession because he really liked women and certain painters were very attractive. Additionally, he was always very interested in women who painted. One of them, a certain Dorothea Tanning, a pretty girl from the Middle West, although pretentious, boring, stupid, vulgar and dressed with terrible taste, was quite talented and imitated Max’s painting, which flattered him a lot. “His ambitions were so obvious that they were sometimes embarrassing,” Peggy continued.
“Max always defended Miss Tanning and said she wasn’t such a little thing as I said. One day a letter from him arrived at his house with a piece of blue silk in the envelope. It was a stupid letter and in poor French. After reading it, I slapped Max several times with all my might,” he concludes.
Just three weeks after this studio meeting planned by Levy between Ernst and Tanning, the German Dadaist left the Guggenheim. “They quickly became more than friends, that’s when I realized I should have only had 30 women in the exhibition,” the collector writes in the aforementioned memoir.
Far beyond orthodox surrealism
Tanning was much more than the wife and widow of Ernst, who died in France in 1976. They were not relatives because “having children is a rich thing and we are poor,” the artist said. After leaving New York, the couple settled in Arizona, then moved – and stayed – for more than 30 years in France, where they rediscovered the artistic and social splendor of the European avant-garde years. Even if nothing would be the same.
participated in Exhibition of 31 women at 30 West 57th Street in New York, sharing the poster with the best of the moment, with the exception of Georgia O’Keeffe, who rejected the offer to exhibit from the first moment. “Georgia arrived at the gallery and blurted out to Peggy, ‘I’m not a woman painter.’ “Peggy was in shock,” says Jimmy Ernst in his memoirs.
Later, Tanning would also adopt this same position, when curators and art historians began to use the female artist binary as a claim for their projects, particularly in the 1970s, explaining that “there is nothing (nor anyone) who can be defined as such.” It is a contradiction as obvious as that of the “artist man” or the “artist elephant”. You can be a woman and be an artist; but you cannot avoid the first and the second is what you really are.
However, says Alyce Mahon, professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Cambridge, “clearly the importance of this exhibition of 31 emerging women lay not only in the gender of its protagonists, it became a fundamental stage of the avant-garde during the war. He also acknowledges that the critics were “hostile, both against women artists and against the surrealists, because both represented a threat to the established order.”
In the press, the critic Henry McBridge wrote in New York sunshine that “surrealism is made up of 70% hysteria, 20% literature, 5% good paintings and another 5% artists who only want to make fun of the innocent public, women must stand out among the surrealists” .
Even so, Tanning made her way as a painter, writer and sculptor, experimenting with soft sculptures that she sewed with her Singer sewing machine and used for her sets and installations; she also designed the house where she lived with Ernst, as well as sets. for George Balanchine’s ballet.
She was a different surrealist, she created work with active female protagonists, thus offering a different vision from that of her male colleagues. “The domain of the marvelous is her homeland, she refuses to pledge allegiance to the demands of orthodox surrealism,” details Ernst’s text which accompanies the first personal exhibition at the Julien Levy gallery, in April 1944.
Tanning died in New York at age 101. She did not have children, although she addresses motherhood and childhood in many of her works. “Having children is the business of the rich and we are poor,” he says in his memoirs. Between lives.
