THE INFANTILE CORPOREALITY IN DOROTHEA TANNING’S ART
THE INFANTILE CORPOREALITY IN DOROTHEA TANNING’S ART

Summary/Abstract: Dorothea Tanning was a painter, sculptor and writer whose oeuvre offers a remarkable outlook on XXth century female Surrealism. Part of a generation of women artists who redefined a paradigm, Dorothea Tanning is also a unique interpreter of the body archetype in modern art. Along with other artists who challenged body normativity, such as Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington, Tanning imagined alternative ways of revealing the body, focusing on the immature body, that of children and adolescents. This paper will revisit Tanning’s works from 1942-1960 in order to analyze the artist’s predilect manner of representing the infantile body, while also paying special attention to her interest in representations of infantile perversion and violence. Drawing from the radical vision of the Marquis de Sade to which she superimposes Surrealist tropes, Tanning creates a unique imagination of childhood and early adolescence as transitional ages that must be delimited and freed from the stereotypes of innocence and angelic ingenuity.

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