As a Surrealist artist, Ms. Tanning mined her unconscious, producing disturbing images such as “Maternity’’ (1946), showing a troubled mother, her long gown ripped to rags at the belly, holding a fretful baby. At her feet lies a poodle with a child’s face.
Like other Surrealist painters, she was meticulous in her attention to details and in building up surfaces with carefully muted brushstrokes.
But in the mid-1950s she broke from the mirrorlike precision of narrative Surrealism to for what she called “prism’’ paintings, later renamed “Insomnias.’’ These are enigmatic canvases in which bodies and body parts, barely discernible visages, and biomorphic forms float in dream spaces generated by fractured planes and diaphanous scrims.
Her versatility extended to sculpture. In 1969 she experimented with soft figures that she made on an old Singer sewing machine. She used a group of them in “Hotel du Pavot, Chambre 202’’ (1970-1973), in which figures breached papered walls of a simulated hotel room, an early example of the now widespread practice of installation art.
Among her other achievements were ballet designs for the late George Balanchine, choreographer and artistic director for the New York City Ballet; etchings for illustrated books; and the design of a house for herself and Ernst in the south of France.
Dorothea Margaret Tanning was born to middle-class parents in Galesburg, “a place where you sat on the davenport and waited to grow up,’’ as she put it in her autobiography, “Between Lives: An Artist and Her World’’ (2001).
She reached adulthood endowed with good looks and ambition, but to the chagrin of her parents, who feared she would become “bohemian,’’ she aspired to a life in art. And she made one, leaving art school in Chicago to study informally on her own by roaming the Art Institute there.
Known as Dottie Tanning in Galesburg (home also of the poet Carl Sandburg, a friend of her Swedish-born father’s), she reclaimed her birth name, Dorothea, and began meeting interesting and important people.
