Dorothea Tanning: Erotic and Dark Aesthetics

Abstract

Inspired by the greatly stimulating psycho-dramas of gothic and erotic fiction and the revolutionary potential of Surrealism, Dorothea Tanning renovates images which aim to go into the nature of feminine (and infancy) sensual and corporal experience, falling down the frontier between the real world and imagination pro a smooth inventive world wherein all odds can imaginably exist. The most famous work of Tanning art is perhaps the one from the 1940s where the artist utilizes a specific vivid approach to represent eroticism. Nevertheless, in deviating from this method to a further theoretical way, the woman artist scatters her wish to depict the gothic just as she was illustrating a gothic tale, to remind the gothic appreciation of difference and disintegration via pensiveness. An erotic charge throbs throughout Tanning’s work; youthful girls’ clothes seem ragged and hair tackled a lavish life of its own as the boundary between inexperience and knowledge becomes blurred. A power rises above the specifically erotic and turns out to be a more broad desire to live in any of its demonstrations.