Dorothea Tanning

The artist, writer and poet, Dorothea Tanning was a central figure in the Surrealist movement. This book shows how one trailblazing woman artist expanded Surrealism in bold new ways for the modern age.

Selected by Christie’s as a Best New Art Book 2026.

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.