Artist-writer Dorothea Tanning dies at 101

Over more than a century, Dorothea Tanning collided and consorted with artistic titans of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, John Cage and Joseph Cornell. She designed sets for George Balanchine ballets, played romantic matchmaker for poet Andre Breton and appeared in Hans Richter's avant-garde films -- but she remained best known as the wife of Surrealist Max Ernst, to whom she was married for nearly 30 years.

Tanning, who was also a celebrated American artist and poet, and came to be known as "the last living Surrealist," died Tuesday at her Manhattan home, according to the Dorothea Tanning Collection and Archive. She was 101.

Several of her best-known paintings are on display through May at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art show, "In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States."

The "most riveting portrait" in the exhibition's introductory gallery is "Birthday," Tanning's hyper-realist 1942 self-portrait, Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote last month. He called it "an image of awakening power." In "Birthday," the artist presents herself as bare-breasted and barefooted, grasping roots emerging from her skirt. Lurking at her feet is a mythical beast, a basilisk, "which could kill with just a puff of its poison breath," Knight wrote. "Tanning seems capable of accomplishing the same with just a glance."

She began her extraordinary life as Dorothea Margaret Tanning in Galesburg, Ill., on Aug. 25, 1910, the child of Swedish immigrants. Tanning moved to Chicago in 1934 after dropping out of Knox College in Galesburg. She briefly attended the Chicago Academy of Art and embarked on big-city adventures that must have made her parents blanch -- Tanning later claimed a liaison with a Chicago gangster who was murdered during their date and a job interview in which she was persuaded to shed her clothes.

Tanning soon moved to New York City and settled into commercial illustration until a 1936 show, "Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism," at the Museum of Modern Art inspired her to become a serious painter.

In New York, Tanning's art career received a boost when gallery owner Julien Levy took her under his wing and another boost when art patron Peggy Guggenheim sent her then-husband, Max Ernst, to Tanning's studio to choose a painting for inclusion in "Exhibition by 31 Women," an important 1943 show at Guggenheim's New York gallery.

Ernst was entranced by Tanning. Within two years, Tanning had her first solo exhibition, at Levy's gallery. Within four, she became Ernst's fourth wife (in a double ceremony with photographer-filmmaker Man Ray and Juliet Browner) and moved to Sedona, Ariz., where they built a house with their own hands.

Tanning collaborated on Balanchine ballets and painted some of her best-known canvasses in the late 1940s and early '50s, including such theatrical tableaux as "Interior With Sudden Joy" and "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." Living and working alongside Ernst until his death in 1976, Tanning continued to make paintings and sculptures in the shadow of an art world legend.

"I even made a note one summer in my notebooks: 44 days, 47 visits," she once said. "I would have painted three times as many pictures otherwise." The couple moved to France in 1949 and spent more than two decades there. Tanning's paintings grew increasingly abstract, her figures becoming so fluid that bodies dissolved altogether.