Alexandre Iolas, New York

Georges and Suzanne Visat, Paris 

Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

Private Collection

Kasmin, New York 

Private Collection (Acquired from the above by the present owner)

- New York, Alexandre Iolas Gallery, Dorothea Tanning, February 23 – March 18, 1961.

- Paris, Galerie Mouradian-Vallotton, Dorothea Tanning, Peintures 1959-1962, May 15 – June 6, 1962, cat. no. 7 (dimensions erroneously catalogued as 100 x 81 cm).

- Cologne, Galerie der Spiegel, Dorothea Tanning: Bilder, Gouaches, Zeichnungen 1957-1963, June 14 – July 1963, cat. no. 12.

- Berlin, Amerika Haus, Dorothea Tanning: Bilder, Gouaches, Zeichnungen Collagen, January 25 – February 27, 1964.

- Basel, Galerie d'Art Moderne, Marie-Suzanne Feigel, Dorothea Tanning, November 12 – December 31, 1966, cat. no. 3.

- Knokke-le-Zoute, Casino Communal, XXe Festival Belge D'Été: Dorothea Tanning, June – August 1967, cat. no. 51.

- San Francisco, Frey Norris Gallery, Dorothea Tanning: Beyond the Esplanade: Paintings, Drawings and Prints from 1940 to 1965, November 19, 2009 – January 30, 2010, cat. no. 11.

- San Francisco, Gallery Wendi Norris, Dorothea Tanning: Unknown but Knowable States, January 10 – March 2, 2013, cat. no. 2.

- New York City, Kasmin, Dorothea Tanning: Doesn't the Paint Say It All?, March 3 – April 16, 2022.

R. Frey and W. Norris, Dorothea Tanning: Beyond the Esplanade: Paintings, Drawings and Prints from 1940 to 1965, exh. cat., San Francisco, Frey Norris Gallery, 2009, pp. 3, 36 and 37 (illustrated in color).

Dorothea Tanning: Unknown but Knowable States, exh. cat., San Francisco, Gallery Wendi Norris, 2013, pp. 22 and 23 (illustrated in color).

Dorothea Tanning: Doesn't the Paint Say it All?, exh. cat., New York, Kasmin Gallery, 2022, pp. 37— (illustrated in color).

If you have trouble sleeping I highly recommend listening Lex Friedman podcast. The combination of his languid voice and the sheer amount of mental energy required to keep up with his discussion creates the perfect terrain to knock you out.

The last episode I listened to was an interview on the mechanics behind SMR-derived energy -small modular nuclear reactors. I did not understand much of it, but I was reappraised with the concept of fusion: two nuclei, not naturally meant to come together, are forced into one another, releasing a massive amount of energy.

Figuration and abstraction are like two antagonistic, if not irreconcilable, molecules, each with its own quantum properties, not meant to mix. Yet in the 20th century, a few mad nuclear artist-scientists - think de Kooning, Dorothea Tanning, and, more recently, Cecily Brown - attempted, through immense pictorial pressure and coercion, to fuse figuration and abstraction into one. They would then step back and observe the result. And when the experiment did not fail - because it often did - the outcome was, as you might expect, a massive release of pictorial energy.

You do not need to be Oppenheimer to see that this is exactly what is happening in the present painting, whose off centered nucleus turns into a smoldering and convulsing magma that twist and turns the entire force field of the canvas. 

Having been in the shadows of her husband Max Ernst people are now just awakening to the genius of Tanning , for now they are still chasing here surrealist years, but her biggest contribution to the science of art in my mind is this present series. Do yourself a favor and go to MOMA and see their recent Tanning acquisition Dogs of Cythera and you will see for your eyes that this may have been art E=mc2 moment with one little difference its was discovered by a woman.

When Dorothea Tanning painted Ignoti nulla cupido in 1960, her canvases had already, as she put it, “literally splintered.” Around 1955, she recalled: “Their colors came out of the closet, you might say, to open the rectangles to a different light. They were prismatic, surfaces where I veiled, suggested and floated my persistent icons and preoccupations, in another of the thousand ways of saying the same things.” In Ignoti nulla cupido, this splintering is fully realized. The composition resists resolution, unfolding as a field of shifting forms — corporeal fragments, fleeting gestures, and suggestions of flesh that emerge only to dissolve again into atmosphere. Color is no longer descriptive but generative, structuring the painting as a space of transformation rather than representation.

This moment in Tannings work has often been described in terms of rupture. As Gaby Wood observed, in the mid-1950s “the forms in her paintings exploded into abstraction, into hazy entwined half-bodies and a fug of chalky or fire-like colors.” Her comparison — “as if you’d dreamed that the Sistine Chapel had been painted over by Francis Bacon” — captures something of the strange fusion at play: a lingering sense of figuration overtaken by a more volatile, almost convulsive painterly language. Tanning herself described the act of painting in similarly visceral terms: “Every canvas is a crisis, a convulsion.”

And yet, these paintings are not simply expressions of painterly abandon. They are carefully attuned to the temporality of looking. “Revealment was something for the viewer’s participation. I wanted to make a picture that you didn’t see all at once. All of my pictures of this period I felt you should discover slowly and that they would almost be kaleidoscopes that would shimmer and that you would discover something new every time you looked at it.” Ignoti nulla cupido operates precisely in this way. Its imagery does not resolve into a single, stable form but remains in flux, inviting a prolonged, almost recursive act of viewing.

This shift did not emerge in isolation but was the result of a longer evolution within Tanning’s practice. She would not encounter modern art in any meaningful way until visiting the 1936–37 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York — an experience she later described as an “explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels,” a “limitless expanse of possibility [that]… would possess me utterly.” From that moment, Surrealism became both her language and her milieu. Her early paintings of the 1940s are among the most iconic images of American Surrealism, unfolding in meticulously rendered interiors where dream and waking life collapse into one another.

By contrast, the paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s jettison that illusionistic clarity. Carefully staged rooms give way to indeterminate spaces; figures, once crisply defined, become unstable, metamorphic. And yet, the underlying concerns remain remarkably consistent. Tanning continued to explore the body as a site of psychological intensity — its desires, its vulnerabilities, its transformations — but now through a language that resists containment. If the earlier works depict the dream, these later works inhabit something closer to a state of sleepless consciousness: wide awake, yet unmoored.

Tanning’s refusal to settle into a single style was central to her thinking. “Artists can change and move on,” she remarked, “and that’s much more interesting than being like Chagall, who painted the same damn thing all his life. Don’t you think? I think that’s like turning out shirts.” The paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s mark the result of that conviction: a decisive break from the meticulously rendered dreamscapes of her earlier work in favor of a more fluid, open-ended pictorial language. A language that would soon take on new form in her soft sculptures.

This commitment to reinvention unfolded alongside her proximity to the central figures of 20th-century modernism. Some years earlier, after leaving New York for Arizona with Max Ernst, Tanning had sublet her apartment to her friend Teeny and her husband, Marcel Duchamp. “One of the droll results of this,” she later wrote, “was that for a time there were four names on our brass letterbox in the little entrance vestibule”: Matisse (from Teeny’s previous marriage to Pierre Matisse), Ernst, Duchamp, Tanning. She added, pointedly, “When this amusing fact is reported… the last of the four names is omitted. After all, why not? In reports of this kind it is luster that is required, not accuracy.” Today, Tanning’s work commands the recognition it has long warranted. Seen in full, it reveals a practice defined not by allegiance to a movement, but by a continual reimagining of its possibilities.