'Palaestra' was an ancient Greek term for a practice arena for wrestlers. Here little girls practice a sort of bed-wrestling their elders try to deny they engage in.

Selin Genc (in an article at thedebutante.online/post/dorothea-tanning-and-perilous-childhoods-iii-palaestra), writes that the ringmaster of this surreal circus (upper right) is from a silhouette of the Marquis de Sade as a little boy.

And here I always thought it was just (just!) a child dominatrix. With her little whip.

As far as I know, this is a not a specific dream of Tanning's. But it's about dreams--the censorship of dreams! Tanning found Surrealism exciting as a movement, even revolutionary in many ways... but not sexually. Most male Surrealist painters were Freudians with clichéd views of women--and their work shows it.

• 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.

A lot of Tanning's work through the 1940s tries to show girls' fantasies and dreams--uneasy, pansexual, sometimes ambivalent, sometimes perverse, but always passionate. Other paintings in this series: Children's Games, the famous Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and to some extent Avatar.

--Chris Wayan

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