Dorothea Tanning is a complex artist with decades-long phases--classic surrealism in the 1940s, simultaneously abstract/figurative paintings in the 50s, huge soft-sculpture installations in the 60s and 70s, poetry in recent years. Few recount specific dreams, but a lot address the dream process--especially girls' and women's dreams. She found male Surrealists rather Freudian and sexist (and I agree: for example, see Dali's Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate...). I vividly recall Whitney Chadwick's book on women Surrealists, showing Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and others--I recognized their dreamworld as like my own, while their male counterparts were visually startling but... just not me.

Two pieces here, Bed Vortex and Corner Torso, aren't Tanning's but mine, as I responded to her.

RELATED TOPICS: Surrealism - abstraction - dream sculpture - Freud - sex - puberty & sexual awakening - gender & bias - See also the full INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

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	AVATAR: by Dorothea Tanning, recurrent flight-dreams 1920-22?, painted '47 "Have you dreamt of flying? I often have." Though her painting shows a bedroom trapeze act that seems to be summoning surreal spirits...
	BED VORTEX: by Wayan; 2002/10/24, an abstract Halloween portrait of the hypnogogic state I sculpted a plaster abstract, then found it wasn't. A vortext of bedsheets, faces, hands, bodies...
	BRIDGE, MOON, PROFESSOR, SHOES: by Dorothea Tanning; 2003? Poem of a flying dream The moon invites me to go flying, but I get tired of magic and just want to go shopping...
	CHAMBRE 202, HOTEL DE PAVOT: by Dorothea Tanning, epic soft sculpture, 1970-3. In the hotel of dreams, blobby throbbing bodies burst out of the walls. Even tables and chairs erupt with...
	CHILDREN'S GAMES: by Dorothea Tanning, surrealist painting, 1942. In my drab childhood home, fierce little girls tear down the wallpaper to bare fleshy, throbbing things...
	CORNER TORSO: by Wayan; 1996/9/18 to 1998/7/21; a surreal nondream sculpture. A surreal statue of a naked body spilling out of the wall as if someone's caught between dimensions... CAUTION: NUDITY
	INSOMNIA: by Dorothea Tanning; 1957, a surreal dream-frustration painting. Sleepless? Not quite. Twisted sheets hide furtive hypnogogic dreams, tangled in a cloudy orgy, never coming clear...
	EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK: by Dorothea Tanning; childhood fantasies 1920-2, painted 1943. In the corridors of a dream hotel, next to a monstrous sunflower, little girls strip and play with whips...
	PALAESTRA: by Dorothea Tanning, tween hypnogogic sex dreams 1920-2, painted 1949. Girls wrestle, tangled in sheets, competing to climb the orgasmic pyramid. The ringmaster-referee's the boy Marquis de Sade... CAUTION: IMPLIED UNDERAGE SEX
	PURSUED, I RAN INTO THE BARN: by Dorothea Tanning; 2003? A nightmare-poem A monster's out to eat my dog--and maybe me. We get cornered in the barn...

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