Exquisite Dreams

Description

Beautifully illustrated with images of Dorothea Tanning’s artwork and more, the first—and definitive—study of this important artist’s life and creative output.  
Exquisite Dreams is the first full account of the art and life of Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012). Rather than only focusing on her well-known surrealist paintings, this book gives equal weight to Tanning’s lesser-known but equally powerful sculptures, abstract paintings, and films. Setting Tanning’s writings, biography, and artwork into the contexts of advertising, fashion, popular culture, and art in New York and Paris, Lyford brings Tanning’s ideas and feelings to life. Using new archival sources and analyses of Tanning’s work in a variety of media, Lyford broadens our understanding of the artist. This amply illustrated book is an important contribution to the history of women artists, gender and sexuality studies, as well as the history of Surrealism. It will appeal to art historians and art lovers alike. Amy Lyford is the Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is the author of Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France and Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930–1950.