This is a nondream piece, but it's about dreams--the censorship of dreams!

Dorothea Tanning found Surrealism exciting as a movement, even revolutionary in many ways... but not sexually. Male Surrealist painters were sexist, repressed and Freudian, with clichéd views of women--from patronizing to downright hostile.

So she set out to paint an alternative kind of Surrealism. A lot of her works through the 1940s break the spoken rule of the boys' club (I can't call it unspoken; plenty of them said it) that women in art should be passive and decorative.

Instead she shows girls' uncensored fantasies and dreams--uneasy, pansexual, perverse, but always passionate.

I find her paintings stronger than the guys' stuff:

• Magritte's witty and sometimes genuinely dreamlike, but unemotional even when he aims to shock. His figures are just props.
• Max Ernst's best work is more sensually beautiful--a true other world--but still empty. Objects, not subjects. Static. As JG Ballard put it, a "crystal world."
• Salvador Dalí painted a dream by his wife Gala, in Dream Caused by a Bee..., yet she's still an object not the subject. She's allowed no emotion, passion or initiative. Naturally! She's just there to be ogled. I'm sure it raised the price.

I can relate.

Disturbing? Yes. Revolutionary? Oh, yes.

Other paintings in this series: Palaestra (caution, even kinkier vibe), the famous Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and maybe Avatar.

--Chris Wayan

IMAGE SOURCE: Dorothea Tanning ed. by Alyce Mahon (2018), p.111.

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