Dorothea Tanning: Erotic and Dark Aesthetics
Nadia Hamimed
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.
Keywords
Aesthetics, Art, Erotic, Gothic, Surrealism, Tales
References
Asif, N. (2016). Women Surrealists: Muses or Seekers? Thesis of the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Scripps Colleges, California.
Carruthers, V. (2011). Dorothea Tanning and her Gothic Imagination. Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 5, Sydney.
Lumbard, P. (1981). Dorothea Tanning: On the Threshold to a Darker Place. Woman's Art Journal 2. Rutgers University: Woman's Art Inc.
Doy, G. (2002). Drapery, Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture. London: I.B Taurus Press.
Nochlin, L. (1974). Reviews: Dorothea Tanning at C.N.A.C. Journal of Art in America vol. 62.
Tanning, D. (2001). Coming to That: Poems. New York: Graywolf Press.
Tanning, D. (2001). Between Lives: an Artist and her World. New York: W.W. Norton&Co.
Tanning, D. (2004). Chasm: A Weekend. Woodstock: The Overlook Press.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.11n.4p.34
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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