Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois, during a hurricane. From this elemental start she went on to forge a career that spanned the 20th century and some of modern art’s great shifts: the collapse of Europe’s dominance, the turn from artwork as image to artwork as material. Whether in paintings or installations, she was always a Surrealist, her fantastic visions invoking what she called ‘the chimerical world of perpetual astonishment’. Tanning said she wanted to ‘lead the eye into spaces that hid, revealed, transformed all at once’. 

Of all art movements, Surreal-ism has perhaps been the most inhospitable to women artists. André Breton’s original formation prized women as muses and sexualised subjects. Partly in response, some women artists distanced themselves. ‘I was never a Surrealist,’ said Leonora Carrington. Some resisted categorisation as a woman artist, sidestepping the dilemma entirely. This was Tanning’s position, as ‘a human someone who has chosen art … and has utterly failed to understand the pigeonholing (or dove-coterie) of gender’. Since the 1980s, feminist art historians have wanted to balance Surrealism’s heterosexual masculinism with the significance to Surrealism of women artists.

Alyce Mahon’s approach is to define Tanning as an emblematic Surrealist, but of a different kind. Rather than the early 20th-century orthodoxy, Tanning represents more recent understandings of Surrealism as a global movement, one that gained new life in different regions as it continued past mid-century. She started her career