Listeners, I heard you—a bunch of self-admitting hopeless romantics who wanted to hear more about people bound by attraction, fascination. By love. Though there are examples of romantic and sexual relationships between creators that are sprinkled throughout art history as we know it, it’s true that we have the most information about relationships from folks who lived in the last century—because we have greater access to documentation recording the lives of these people, and because, as the 20th century progressed, people—artists, perhaps especially—became more vocal about their relationships, less inhibited. Modern artists, artists especially from the first half of the 20th century, lived their art, and their relationships, out loud-- writing about them, talking about them, and sometimes even creating works of art about them.
This season, I’m rounding up stories about modern artists in love, in lust, in relationships— digging into these individuals, see how their liaisons, marriages, affairs, and connections played in or on their respective works of art, and how, if anything, they affected art history as we know it. I, for one, believe that it’s time for Modern Love.
Today: let’s enjoy learning about the surrealist life and loves of Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
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Episode Credits:
Research by Holly Sauer. Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Additional music by Storyblocks.
ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
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Episode Transcript
A few years ago, all the way back in what feels now like the toddler years of ArtCurious, I decided to produce a season of the show all around the concept of rivals. Rivals! What’s juicier than a story about two people pitted against each other, a story full of swirling drama, of revenge, of bitterness, of wrongs done? It’s what so many of the best novels, movies, and TV shows are made of, and I mean, books and movies and TV shows have all actually been titled Rivals. It’s a good theme. And it's still one of my favorite seasons of the show to this day, one that features big, recognizable names at each other’s metaphorical throats: Picasso vs. Matisse; Turner vs. Constable; Pollock vs. de Kooning; and, in one of my favorite, thought-provoking pairings, Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner vs. their respective husbands. It’s fun, right? And it was a fun way, too, to get to know some of these artists and what made them tick.
But as much as I personally enjoyed working on that season, I can also admit that, at times, it was uncomfortable for me to sit myself amidst all the backbiting and debating, even for the sake of sharing what ended up being a round of really great stories about some interesting artists, and their works of art. It was worth it, don’t get me wrong. And I know that many of you enjoyed it, because over the years, you’ve told me so. But in those in-person comments, IG messages, and emails, you’ve frequently followed up your statement with a question. “I loved your season on rivalries,” you’d say. “Have you ever considered doing a season about artist couples?”
Well, friends? I heard you—a bunch of self-admitting hopeless romantics who wanted to hear more about people bound less by competition and distaste, and more by attraction, fascination. By love. Though there are examples of romantic and sexual relationships between creators that are sprinkled throughout art history as we know it, it’s true that we have the most information about relationships from folks who lived in the last century—because we have greater access to documentation recording the lives of these people, and because, as the 20th century progressed, people—artists, perhaps especially—became more vocal about their relationships, less inhibited. Modern artists, artists especially from the first half of the 20th century, lived their art, and their relationships, out loud-- writing about them, talking about them, and sometimes even creating works of art about them.
So this season, I’m rounding up stories about modern artists in love, in lust, in relationships—but don’t worry, there will still be plenty of drama to share as we dig into these individuals, see how their liaisons, marriages, affairs, and connections played in or on their respective works of art, and how, if anything, they affected art history as we know it. I, for one, believe that it’s time for Modern Love.
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. ArtCurious Season 13 is all about Modern Love, and we’re starting today with the pairing of Surrealist painters Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
The road to Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst’s relationship was a long one, and a little bumpy at that, given that Tanning would eventually become Ernst’s fourth wife. Or maybe it wasn’t bumpy at all, but just full of those little twists and turns in the road that brings one, eventually, to their fates. But I’m getting ahead of our story a little bit. Let’s first meet Max Ernst, who came upon the scene—or Earth—earlier than his wife-to-be. Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in the town of Brühl, Germany, about 20 kilometers south of Cologne. Max Ernst’s story follows a similar path as many artists—one in which the artist’s father brings the world of art to the attention of his child. In Ernst’s case, that’s definitely true, except that his father wasn’t a professional artist. He was a teacher, though, working at a school for the deaf, but he enjoyed painting, as an amateur, in his off hours. So it was through him that Ernst learned to enjoy art, as well as some basics of technique. But his relationship with his father also affected him in another way that would have long consequences: his dad, who was a strict disciplinarian, would inspire him, too, to reject authority and many quote-unquote “traditional” modes of thinking, working, and living. Subsequently, he opted not to pursue any artistic training, and when he enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1909 at the age of 18, he seemed almost resolute in his determination to study anything but artmaking, taking classes in psychology, philosophy, and literature, with a little art history thrown in for good measure. But he began to take art seriously as a career after he met fellow artist Auguste Macke in 1911, a painter who would become one of the leading artists of the famed Der Blaue Reiter movement—the Blue Rider, a loose association of artists who explored concepts of spirituality in art through a focus on abstraction and bright color, a group named after motifs frequently found in member Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings. Not long after, encounters with the works of Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin at an exhibition in Cologne also shook the artist to his core. This double whammy of exposure to post-Impressionism and Cubism, along with his connection to the German Expressionists circling around and about the Blue Riders, sealed the deal. Art was the way forward. But he’d do it on his terms.
During the same time period, another immensely creative mind was born. Dorothea Tanning was an Illinois girl, born in the town of Galesburg on August 25, 1910. Like Ernst, she developed an interest in art at an early age. By the time she was a teenager, her family knew that she had a gift, but rather than being a strict disciplinarian, her father, Andrew, seemed rather supportive. In one of her two memoirs, a book titled Between Lives, Tanning recalls a formative moment that showcases both her direction forward and her father’s support. Her dad was friends with the poet Carl Sandburg, and one day, he shared her drawings with him. Bursting with pride, Andrew Tanning stated, quote, “We will send her to art school when the time comes.” To which Sandburg declared, quote, “Oh, no. Don’t do that. Not art school. They will stifle her talent and originality.” And the Tanning family—with Dorothea in particular—heeded this advice. After a two-year stint at Knox College, a private liberal arts institution in her hometown, she moved to Chicago to…attend art school at the Chicago Academy of Art. But you can almost hear Sandburg’s advice ringing in her ears. She left after three weeks, later decrying the commercialism of the school. She knew then that she, like her future husband, would create art on her own terms. And there was only one place to go to make that dream happen: New York. And it was to the Big Apple that she moved to in 1935, becoming a commercial artist and art director while she worked to establish herself as a fine artist.
Coming up next, we head back over to Europe to get a taste of Max Ernst’s life over the ensuing decades—we’ll learn about that, and more, right after these quick messages. Thanks for listening.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
During Dorothea Tanning’s childhood and teen years, Max Ernst, on the other side of the Atlantic, underwent some of the most formative years of his life—some good, some bad. In 1914 with the onset of World War I, he was drafted and served in the German army for nearly all of the bloody four-year war, an experience that as, understandably, so traumatizing that, in his autobiography, he imagined himself dead during that time. He wrote, quote, “On the first of August 1914 Max Ernst died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918.” His pal August Macke, by the way, was killed just two months into the war in September of 1914.
In the first episode of Season 2 of ArtCurious, I shared what I called a little “season prologue” about the connections throughout history between art and war. In that episode, I talked briefly about the after-effects of World War I on the art world. For me, one of the most interesting developments is that the war essentially begat Dada, the “anti-art” movement that embraced all things nonsensical in art, dance, literature, music, and more, a radical group of folks who created experimental, performative, and sometimes irreverent works couched in chance and spontaneity: because why follow the rules of creativity when life doesn’t have rules? If a brutal war could utterly destroy the world as it was then known, couldn’t art be destroyed and remade, too? Returning to Cologne after the 1918 Armistice, Ernst sought solace in his art, connecting with the city’s avant-garde community and creating his first experimental pieces in collage. In 1919, he, alongside artist and social activist Johannes Theodor Baargeld, founded the Cologne Dada group.
At that same time, he sought further solace and grounding in romantic relationships. In 1918, he married his first wife, an art critic and art historian (yay) named Luise Straus, a fascinating woman in her own right, whose life was sadly cut short when she was killed in Auschwitz in 1944. In 1921, Luise and Max’s child, Ulrich, known as Jimmy, was born. But trouble in Paradise and all that, y’all, and we might be able to put a little of the inspiration (or blame, depending on your point of view) on the surrealist figurehead, French poet Andre Breton. In 1922, Breton published an article with his advice on how to carry on in a still-scarred postwar world. Drop everything, he told his readers. Leave your work, your routine, your family, and go. Coincidentally, Ernst had become friends with Breton the year prior, after Breton brought Ernst to Paris in 1921 to exhibit his works. And it was there that Ernst met the French poet Paul Éluard and his wife, the striking, enigmatic Russian Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, a woman Éluard dubbed Gala.
If you listened to our episode on Gala, who’d eventually go on to become the wife, muse, mother, demon, all-the-above of Surrealist Salvador Dali, then you already know what comes next. Max Ernst heeded Breton’s words to drop everything, and he left his family in 1922 to move in with Éluard and Gala, joining them in a menage à trois that lasted for three years, during which time Ernst moved deeper and deeper into the burgeoning Surrealist movement, harnessing an interest in the unconscious mind to fuel his collages and his paintings. Take one of Ernst’s most fascinating and famous works, Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale, from 1924 and now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as an example. This piece, a mixed media work involving both painting and collage elements, as well as physical items like a doorknob, gate, and a toy house, was reportedly inspired by what Ernst referred to as a “fevervision” from his childhood. For more than twenty years now, I’ve been captivated and disturbed by this work of art. In it, we see a man, faceless and gray, atop the dollhouse roof, a young child bundled in his arm. Two girls, equally gray and ghostly, are on the ground, one lying in a faint, the other brandishing a knife against the threat of the title: a nightingale, barely bigger than a speck against the blue sky. Combined, these 2D and 3D elements perfectly reflect the confoundment so key to Surrealism, that curators at MoMA called it, quote, “making the credible believable, expressing disjunctions of the mind and shocks of societal upheavals with unsettling clarity.”
Speaking of MoMA, this is where Dorothea Tanning found herself a decade later, when the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism hit MoMA in late 1936. This exhibition was huge, and I mean HUGE. It contained more than 700 objects from Europe and the United States over a range of almost 500 years, including such disparate figures as Hieronymus Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci and Giuseppe Archimboldo all the way up to the most contemporary works created that very year by the likes of Dora Maar, Leonor Fini, Yves Tanguy, Alexander Calder, and Walt Disney. I’m linking the master checklist in my blog post for today’s episode because it is just seriously amazing, and I’ve only mentioned a tiny percentage of the named artists therein. If you can’t already tell, I’m astounded by the scope of this exhibition. And Dorothea Tanning? This show shook her. It seemed to fit with everything that she was drawn to, everything that she wanted to express. Of Surrealism in particular, she later wrote, quote, “Here is the infinitely faceted world I must have been waiting for. Here is the limitless expanse of possibility, a perspective having only incidentally to do with painting on surfaces.” Some claim that this was Tanning’s first introduction to Surrealism, while other sources I reviewed noted that she was already working in her own surrealist mode by this point, so there’s some disagreement here. But what we do know is that it was at the MoMA show that she was first introduced to artists like Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and an artist who was profiled in the exhibition with over 40 works of art to his name, and several more collaborative pieces. It was none other than Max Ernst.
It would still be several more years before Tanning and Ernst would cross paths. Tanning traveled to Paris during the summer of 1939 with letters of introduction to several artists, like Pablo Picasso and Yves Tanguy, and she carried a letter of introduction with hopes of meeting Ernst, too. But alas, they didn’t meet, and not too long after, in September of that same year, Ernest was sent to an internment camp near Aix-en-Provence in the South of France, as a quote-unquote, “undesirable foreigner,” since he was, you know, German, and this was the outset of World War II, so the French suspected him, among many others, of being Nazi spies. It was one of four camps that would eventually hold Ernst in captivity before he escaped to the U.S. with the help of famed art collector Peggy Guggenheim in 1941, who owned a number of his works. Guggenheim and Ernst married that year—with her becoming his third wife, after a second union with painter Marie Berthe Aurenche, and, also famously, an affair with fellow Surrealist Leonora Carrington.
Peggy Guggenheim actually played a role in bringing Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning together, though she naturally wouldn’t have known it at the time. In 1942, Guggenheim opened The Art of This Century, a gallery on West 57th Street in New York City, focusing on, well, art of that century—contemporary art. One of her earliest planned shows was Exhibition by 31 Women, an all-female show that was seen as rather forward-thinking at the time, and one that focused heavily on Dada and Surrealist art. In order to help his wife source artists for the exhibition, Max Ernst made a visit to Dorothea Tanning’s apartment to look at her works of art—and there, unfinished and standing on a nearby easel, he saw a self-portrait by Tanning. It’s a gorgeous, gripping piece—Tanning features herself barefoot and with her breasts revealed, her shoulders covered with an incredible purple and green jacket, seemingly a throwback to centuries prior. She holds up a brown and gray skirt across her toned waist, with the skirt seems to sprout tendrils and vines around the back. Her face is expressionless, unreadable, even though a fantastic creature stands at her feet—a creature that art historian Whitney Chadwick has referred to as a “Winged Lemur,” which I can’t help but love. To Tanning’s right is a stream of seemingly never- ending doors, one opening onto another onto another. Precisely rendered and lifelike in detail, Tanning’s method is at odds with the dreamlike quality of her work—a contrast that makes it that much more fascinating. That weird, unknowable quality is what makes it so enticing. And Tanning knew this, knew that she could draw in viewers with her works like this, once noting that mystery in art was, quote, “a very healthy thing, because it encourages the viewer to look beyond the obvious and commonplace.”
Ernst saw this work in Tanning’s apartment, and the story goes that he suggested a title to her: Birthday, he said. It should be called Birthday to symbolize passage from the real world into the surreal world. So that she did. Together the artists played chess, a game that inspired another round of play the following, and Ernst moved in with her one week later.
The couple lived together in New York for almost five years, both working diligently and exhibiting their art until 1946, when they opted to make two drastic life changes: first, they opted to move west, eventually decamping to Sedona, Arizona. But before that, they tied the knot, marrying in a double ceremony in Beverly Hills with fellow Dada artist and Surrealist Man Ray and his lady love, Juliet Browner. Tanning was Ernst’s fourth wife—but this marriage was the one that stuck. They would be married for almost thirty years.
At the start of the episode, I mentioned that I was curious about how their marriage affected the artists’ works of art, if at all. The wonderful thing is that it might not have had a lot of effect on either of them. Not that they didn’t initially attempt to involve themselves in each other’s creative endeavors. As Tanning later wrote, early on in their relationship, she’d gently suggest a change—like changing the color of a particular object from yellow to green, for example—and that Ernst didn’t follow through with her (probably unsolicited) advice. She would also request Ernst’s opinion of a work in progress, even some constructive criticism, but eventually realized that it was a terrible idea. She wrote, quote, “A criticism, even solicited, would have been odious to him as, later, to me. You have your own eye, your own heart, your own soul. What need of the teacher’s foot in the bounteous garden of all that plenty?”
Max Ernst’s heritage eventually caught up with the couple in Arizona. Though he became a naturalized American citizen in 1948, the passage of the McCarran Act in 1950 restricted the movements of those potentially connected to communism—and with Germany, Ernst’s birth country, previously linked to totalitarianism under Hitler, Ernst himself once again began to look suspicious in the eyes of a foreign government, just as he was in the late 1930s in France. So though he and Tanning tried to fight for his rights in the U.S., they eventually opted instead to return to Europe, settling in France in the 1950s. (By the way, in the mid-1960s the U.S. government attempted to make good for all those who had been affected by the McCarran act, offering American citizenship with full rights to live anywhere with no restriction—an offer which Max Ernst declined.)
Europe ended up being pretty great for Dorothea Tanning in particular. One year after they settled in Paris, she enjoyed her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Furstenburg, a show that was a pivotal one for Tanning, presenting her as a celebrated and successful creator in her own right, an artist totally separate from her husband. This seems a little trite now—like, of course she’s separate from her husband—but remember that this was the 1950s, and gender politics were not what they would become even a decade later. Think, too, of artists like Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, both of whom we’ve profiled here on ArtCurious, who struggled to climb out from behind of their own artist husbands. For Tanning, though, it worked. She later declared, quote, “For me, an artist living in the shadow of a great man, it was somehow crucial: the shadow lifted and a gentle but steady light shown on me.” In these decades in particular—the 1950s through the 1970s, Tanning’s work changed massively as she focused more of her time on sculpture, creating these fantastical figures out of textile, a period that she referred to as, quote, “an intense five- year adventure in soft sculpture.” She also actively experimented with printmaking and artist books, and when she was painting, her work moved away from the precision of her early surrealist work and more toward the abstract, though she never lost a focus on the figure, especially the female form.
By no means was Max Ernst lounging about during this time. The same year that Dorothea Tanning experienced European success with her Galerie Furstenburg exhibition, Ernst won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale, one of the most acclaimed international exhibitions of contemporary art. Naturally, he continued to paint, and continued to write, as well, having established himself as a critical artistic voice when he published his book, Beyond Painting, in the late 1940s. But it’s beautiful to think that, at least in some way, Ernst stepped aside a bit in terms of his artistic career to let Tanning jump into the limelight that she rightly deserved as well. Ernst—who, remember, was nearly two decades her elder—had achieved massive success during his peak years. And he supported his partner when it was time for her to enjoy her own peak years, too.
Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning spent 34 years together and were married for almost 30 of those years. Ernst died on April 1, 1975, just shy of his 85th birthday. Of the terrible grief that followed, Tanning said, quote, “He is the lake with an echo: I say Max, everyone says Max, the lake says Max, the echo says Max (far away), and Max is everywhere and part of my throat and the mote in the air. I hold my screaming ears that no one but me can hear.”
Tanning moved back to the U.S. in 1980, and though she continued to produce artworks, the last few decades of her life focused more on writing—lots of writing, producing volumes of poetry, a novel, and two memoirs—memoirs not only about herself, but about her late husband, with her intention being to bring Ernst, quote, “into focus, to brush aside for a little the enigma that he has presented to most people, in short, to make him available and alive as I knew him to be.” Dorothea Tanning outlived her husband by several decades, passing away at the age of 101 on January 31, 2011. With that, the remaining half of one of modern art’s power couples was finally gone- but their vast influence upon the art world—both separate and together—will never be extinguished. Max Ernst, who was what the New York Times would call a, quote, “catalytic figure in 20th century art,” and Dorothea Tanning, who broke the mold for what Surrealist painting and sculpture could be, paving the way for generations of women to follow. When asked by a journalist for Salon in 2002 to describe the impact of her decades of work, Tanning replied, quote, “I’d be satisfied with having suggested that there is more than meets the eye.”
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal. HUGE thanks to Holly Sauer for her excellent research for this episode. The ArtCurious theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Our podcast is co-produced by Kaboonki - podcasts, creative video, and more. Subscribe to their show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at subgenrepodcast.com. Kaboonki: Leave your mark. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space, Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
The ArtCurious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator, which means you can donate tax-free to ArtCurious to show your support. To find the donation links and for more details about our show, please visit our website: artcuriouspodcast.com. We’re also on Facebook and Instagram at artcuriouspod.
Check back with us soon as we explore some of the most unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful Modern art lovers in art history.
