This study overhauls canonical accounts of Surrealism, demonstrating how one woman artist expanded its activity and expression in bold new ways for the modern age
Born on the day of a hurricane in Galesburg, Illinois, Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) would become a figure at the very heart of the avant-garde, among a close circle of contemporaries including Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Lee Miller and Man Ray. Her art and philosophical ideas reveal her transformative impact on post-war Surrealism, and her life story reveals how she skilfully navigated her role as a woman artist on the international stage. Alyce Mahon maps Tanning’s extraordinary seventy-year career—from Chicago and Arizona to Paris and Seillans, through to her final years in New York—and traces how these landscapes were reshaped into kaleidoscopic imagined worlds in her paintings, sculptures and writings.
Alyce Mahon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968; Eroticism and Art; The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde, and numerous essays on Surrealism and the international avant-garde.
Selected by Christie’s as a Best New Art Book 2026
“Mahon’s discussion of [Tanning’s] many meanings are nuanced and sophisticated, offering shrewd interpretations of works that set out to confound, unsettle and disrupt. In doing so she amplifies their poetic charge.”—Ariane Bankes, Spectator
“This in-depth, expertly researched study delivers on its promise to reframe canonical accounts of Surrealism, revealing how one woman artist—operating within a largely male-dominated movement—reinvented its visual language in new ways for the post-war era and beyond.”—Eleanor Sutherland, Aesthetica
“In this long-awaited, enthralling study, Alyce Mahon shows how Dorothea Tanning brought a new and necessary Surrealism to a war-ravaged world and offers stunning analyses of Tanning’s very rich and varied oeuvre.”—Dawn Ades, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, University of Essex
“Alyce Mahon brings a welcome feminist perspective to a traditionally male-dominated narrative while also deftly analysing Surrealist practice across a broader geographical and historical context in this fascinating new study.”—Frances Morris, former director, Tate Modern
“An absorbing journey through the real and imagined landscapes of Dorothea Tanning that broadens our understanding of Surrealism.”—Manuel Borja-Villel, former director, Museo Reina Sofia
