A Kooky Dorothea Tanning at MoMA

Abigail Deutsch recounts Dorothea Tanning's recent presentation at MoMA for Bookforum, noting that the 101-year-old surrealist poet and painter had a crowd of mostly gray or graying, but that she (as Tanning once self-described) “breathes words, as well as air, and looks at her paintings with amazement.” She continues:

Everyone at this event—speakers and spectators alike—seemed to regard Tanning’s achievements with similar amazement. Ann Temkin, the MOMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, appeared in a dazzling geometric dress to inform the crowd that surrealism—a movement of poets and painters—produced hardly any adherents who flourished in both fields. Even within art, she added, Tanning manages a rare fluidity, trying out various styles with “no concern for consistency.” That flexibility marks her poetry as well. A Table of Content (2004) and Coming to That (2011) both alternate between lighthearted and serious, earthbound and abstract, often in the course of a single piece.

The audience was then treated to Tanning’s poetry. To paraphrase Robert Frost, good friends make good readers. J.D. McClatchy and Mark Strand delivered spirited presentations, and Richard Howard, shiny-pated and purple-shirted, noted that Tanning had dedicated one of her poems to him. Then he stopped, sniffed the air, and looked proud. “I love Dorothea,” he said.

Catherine Scully read, or rather intoned, a playful and knowing Tanning composition called “Interval with Kook”:

Morning was unreliable

especially when,

on the way to Kickapoo Hill,

a pebble underfoot slid me sprawling

down the riverbank.

It was then that I saw the kook.

A “kook,” Tanning writes at the beginning of the poem, is “a hybrid of unknown origin, often mistaken for a human being.” Does a painter-poet mélange qualify? Perhaps, and given the collective delight in response to her work, perhaps we all do.

Read the full post here, and read more about Tanning as poet here.