Sunflower in the Hall: Dorothea Tanning

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, Dorothea Tanning 

It has been years since I've been to the Tate Modern, but I remember coming home afterward and trying to google a painting featuring little girls in a hallways with what seemed like a very dangerous and large sunflower. I couldn't find anything about it.

Recently I happened across the image in a blog post about Dorothea Tanning, and all mysteries were revealed. Dorothea Tanning was speaking about her painting (my mystery image) when she said:

At night one imagines all sorts of happenings in the shadows of the darkness. A hotel bedroom is both intimate and unfamiliar, almost alienation, and this can conjure a feeling of menace and unknown forces at play. But these unknown forces are a projection of our own imaginations: our own private nightmares.
     —Dorothea Tanning in an interview with Victoria Carruthers, Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, 2010, p. 112.

Well, perhaps not all mysteries.

For the benefit of all future mes, I added "girls in hallway" and "sunflower" as tags to this post.

Maurice Henry at The Blue Lantern

Jane at The Blue Lantern posted this cartoon of Maurice Henry's from 1947. Here at the Surrealist Museum the artworks oogle while the visitors walk around for their viewing pleasure. I thought it was quite good; see her page for more background.

Wilfredo Lam's The Jungle

The Jungle, 1943

At least the name was familiar. Reading a survey on Caribbean art that I found at the public library, Wilfredo Lam came up at least half a dozen times before I even got to the section on Afro-Cubanism. The Jungle, above, is the most famous example of his work and displays the merging of European painting tradition in its Cubist perspective yet the masked figures amidst the sugarcane and bamboo also reflect the painter's inclusion of his African heritage and culture.

It should be noted that The Jungle was not intended to represent Afro-Cuban traditions literally--the masks are African-inspired rather than relating directly to his experience in Cuba. It is, in fact, a critique. His intention was to describe a spiritual state, most particularly that of an Afro-Cuban culture that had been reduced to absurdity by panning to tourist trade.



"I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters."- Wilfredo Lam


La Silla, 1943
Lam was born in Cuba to a Chinese father and a half Congolese, half Cuban mulatto mother. After studying in Cuba, he moved to Madrid and then Paris to continue his training. He became friends with Picasso and his circle and was influenced by them. He later traveled through the Caribbean with Andre Breton, another influential person in the Caribbean arts scene of the time.

When he returned to Havana in 1941, Lam became newly aware of Afro-Cuban traditions, which he felt were being lost and made picturesque for tourists. He wished to free Cuba from cultural subjugation and to rediscover its African heritage. Many great artists of the 20th century combined radical style with "primitive" arts. Lam did so by synthesizing the Surrealist and Cubist forms to express the iconography of Afro-Cubanism. Authenticity was perhaps more created than discovered in his work. A successful artist internationally who supported his ingenuous roots, he died in Paris in 1982. He remains widely influential in Cuba and throughout the Caribbean.

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Lobster: It's What's For Dinner

Dali, 1936

Surrealists seemed to dig this red crustacean. It's one of those natural objects that look like a dream. Especially creepy when they are alive and brown with their antennae poking about your living room as you urge them to race.

Yes, tonight is the night of the great lobster race. We're upping the ante tonight, as my boyfriend and I will be having company for dinner. So instead of just two lobsters, we'll have six lobsters. You line them up and then urge them to move forward. It sounds slightly more exciting than it is, given that these are not fast land animals. In an ideal world, the winner of the race would avoid the pot and become a cherished household pet. However, life is short and brutish. All the lobsters are going in the pot tonight. [Insert evil grin]

As much as I enjoy these events, live lobsters creep me out Annie Hall style. So what I'm wondering is--did Dali use a real deccissitated lobster for his ridiculous, iconic telephone? I'm going to assume it is plastic for my own sanity.