ABOUT THIS BOOK

Dorothea Tanning, one of the twentieth-century's most original and provocative painters, delivers a vivid account of a fascinating life lived as an artist among artists. Tanning reveals not only her life story, but the irresistibly creative mind that propelled her to live it. From the small town of Galesburg, Illinois, to the art hubs of New York and Paris, Tanning traveled the world of Surrealism and went beyond it, with fellow explorers Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, Joan Miró, James Merrill, and Max Ernst, to whom she was married for over thirty years. Their life together forms an important and moving part of her unforgettable story; a story which, spanning almost a century, magically unfolds through Tanning's incandescent prose.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois. Her paintings and sculptures rank among the msot inventive works of any living American artist and can be found in numerous collections, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and many others. She is also the author of Birthday (Lapis Press, 1986), and her poetry has appeared in Parnassus, Yale Review, Paris Review, and Ploughshares and was included in The Best Poetry 2000.

REVIEWS

"Tanning's . . . beguiling memoir chronicles her small-town Midwestern girlhood and travels through the postwar art worlds of New York and Paris, where she collaborated with George Balanchine on ballet sets and spent decades reconfiguring female anatomy in delirious nudes." --Vogue

"A mix of acidic critique, clear-eyed remembrance, and funny, name-dropping anecdotes, this autobiography offers a glimpse of the creative process and reveals some of the sacrifices required of an ambitious, creative woman wed to a more famous man." --Village Voice

"In buoyant and electric prose, laced with wit and leavened with ungrudging generosity, Dorothea Tanning has given us in this memoir a brilliant account of the fizz and panache of a truly remarkable life: Stravinsky provides her wedding champagne; Andre Malraux upstages Orson Welles; J. Robert Oppenheimer turns up at Les Deux Magots; and the gentle and enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning's husband, is the presiding spirit." --Anthony Hecht

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter One: Headlong
Chapter Two: Before and Always
Chapter Three: Flight
Chapter Four: An Artist Remembers
Chapter Five: Cactus and Stars
Chapter Six: Paris with a Patina
Chapter Seven: In "the Garden of France"
Chapter Eight: Provence and a House
Chapter Nine: Plummeted Bird
Chapter Ten: A Time Suspended
Chapter Eleven: Unfinished Picture
Chapter Twelve: Veils and Verities

Acknowledgments
Index

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