12 Facts About Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Margaret Tanning was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet.

Dorothea Tanning was married briefly to the writer Homer Shannon in 1941, after an eight-year relationship.

In New York, Dorothea Tanning discovered Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art's seminal 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.

Dorothea Tanning continued to create studio art in the 1980s, then turned her attention to her writing and poetry in the 1990s and 2000s, working and publishing until the end of her life.

Dorothea Tanning died on 31 January 2012, at her Manhattan home at age 101.

In 1997, The Dorothea Tanning Foundation was established, with a purpose dedicated to preserving the artist's legacy and fostering a broader public understanding of the artist's art, writing, and poetry.

Apart from three weeks she spent at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art in 1930, Dorothea Tanning was a self-taught artist.

Dorothea Tanning read many Gothic and Romantic novels from her local library in her hometown of Galesburg.

Dorothea Tanning designed sets and costumes for several of George Balanchine's ballets, including The Night Shadow, and performed in two of Hans Richter's avant-garde films, Dreams That Money Can Buy and 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements.

From 1969 to 1973, Dorothea Tanning embarked on what she described as "an intense five-year adventure in soft sculpture," concentrating on a body of three-dimensional works in fabric, a departure from traditional, harder, longer-lasting sculptural materials.

Dorothea Tanning's work has been recognized in numerous one-person exhibitions, both in the United States and in Europe, including major retrospectives in 1974 at the Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Paris, and in 1993 at the Malmo Konsthall in Sweden and then at the Camden Arts Centre in London.

In 1994, Dorothea Tanning endowed the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, an annual prize of $100,000 awarded to a poet in recognition of outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.