Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World - Alyce Mahon

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 female 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.

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: April 2026

Format: Hardback

Pages: 264

Dimensions: 17.53 x 2.54 x 24.64 cm