Dorothea Tanning, Tate Modern review – a gorgeous trip through gothic nightmares

Tate Modern, London
Her disturbing art is the climax of surrealism, but this exhibition also reveals Tanning’s appetite for the gothic and its long history of female creativity

I’m looking into a seedy hotel room. The lights are low. Bodies are sprouting from cracks in the walls. A creature straight out of a Bosch vision of hell is creeping, or is it seeping, out of the fireplace. Worst of all, somehow, is a human(ish) leg emerging from an armchair and stretching across the room. All the monstrosities in Dorothea Tanning’s 1970 installation Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot are made of soft stuffed fabric that intensifies their uncanny effect. These stitched-together textiles bulging with mysterious innards are queasily corporeal. This life-sized room from a fleapit Paris hotel is infected with nameless terrors and depraved memories.

Perhaps they are memories of surrealism. For Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot is surely the last great masterpiece of this movement founded by French poets after the first world war. Surrealism called for an art of the unconscious, inspired by Sigmund Freud’s writings on dreams and sexuality. Dorothea Tanning, who was born in small-town Illinois in 1910, was one of a generation of US artists who fell in love with surrealism and, in her case, a surrealist – in 1946 she married Max Ernst. Tanning’s late works are revealed as a sensational climax of the surrealist movement by Tate Modern’s sensitive and fascinating reappraisal of her. But this gorgeous trip through 20th-century dreams and nightmares also shows that she was never simply a surrealist, let alone a mere follower of the movement’s European founders. Something else pervades her imagination – an appetite for the gothic and its long history of female creativity.

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