In the late 1960s the American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) turned from the painted canvas to the sewing machine and crafted thrift shop textiles and found objects into soft sensual sculptures. With the help of such everyday things as stuffing, tweed, ping pong balls and jigsaw pieces, she transformed the domestic object and interior into vehicles for Surrealist possibility. A seamstress’ pin cushion became a dark, velvet symbol of desire (Pincushion to Serve as Fetish, 1965), a love seat became lovers entwined (Rainy Day Canape, 1970), and an uncanny Alice in Wonderland-like installation, Poppy Hotel, Room 202, (1970-73) stood as a triumph of tactile softness over rational, masculinist hardness. In her own words, Tanning envisaged “living materials becoming living sculptures, their life span something like ours”.
This talk draws on Mahon’s research as the curator of the first major retrospective of Dorothea Tanning for the Museo Reina Sofia and the Tate Modern in 2018-2019, as well as her forthcoming monograph Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World (Yale University Press, 2025) and considers Tanning’s material transformations in terms of a Surrealist ecopoetics that continues to inspire contemporary artists as we mark the centenary of the first manifesto.
Alyce Mahon (Alumna, PhD 1999) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and the Head of Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (Thames & Hudson, 2005), Eroticism & Art (Oxford University Press, 2007), The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 2020), and Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World (forthcoming Yale, 2025) as well as the edited catalogue Dorothea Tanning (Reina Sofia/ Tate, 2018), and numerous essays on Surrealist, avant-garde, and feminist art. She is also the inaugural co-editor of the International Journal of Surrealism [IJS], published by University of Minnesota Press and serves on the Board of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism [ISSS]. Mahon curated SADE: Freedom or Evil for the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2023, and Dorothea Tanning: Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door for the Museo Reina Sofia and the Tate Modern in 2018-2019. She frequently serves as curatorial advisor for Surrealist shows – most recently for Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds (Tate St Ives & Tate Britain, 2025), and Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire 1930-1990 (Museum of Sex, New York, 2018- 2019), as well as specialist author for exhibition catalogues, including Surréalisme (Centre Pompidou, 2024), Surrealism & Design Now: From Dalí to AI (Museum of Design, London, 2022-23); The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Surrealism & Magic (Peggy Guggenheim Collection & Barberini Museum, 2022), Maria Martins: Desejo Imaginante (MASP, Sao Paulo, 2021), Fantastic Women – Surreal Worlds. From Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2020), and Couples Modernes (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2018).
Organised by Professor Gavin Parkinson (Professor in European Modernism, The Courtauld) as part of the 2024-25 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, ‘A Century of Surrealism: Resistance and the Image Since the Manifesto of Surrealism’.
