Between Lives: An Artist and Her World - Softcover

Tanning, Dorothea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393343987 ISBN 13: 9780393343984

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

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 Miro, 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.

About this title

Review:

"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


"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"


"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

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; at a Paris soiree, 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. This is a sustained success of recuperative magic. --Anthony Hecht

It seems hardly fair that Dorothea Tanning, in a long, passionately inventive career as a painter, should have acquired as well the other harmony of prose, and that her passionate inventions as a writer should be so lovingly, so wisely resolved. Indeed it is not fair at all: the Muse was never an equal-opportunity employer, and the only appropriate response to Between Lives is untempered gratitude. How grateful I am for the Muse's caprice, twice over, for Dorothea Tanning is a dauntless writer who is entitled to love her life; she created it, and now, quite unfairly, I love it, too. --Richard Howard

About the Author:

Dorothea Tanning's painting and sculpture rank among the most inventive of any living American artist. Her poetry has appeared in The New Republic, Partisan Review, and The Paris Review, among many other publications, and was included in The Best American Poetry 2000. She lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393343987
• ISBN 13: 9780393343984
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 414