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Lot Essay
Filled with an electric, disquieting atmosphere, Children’s Games is a rich, mysterious composition that showcases the intriguing power of Dorothea Tanning’s early Surrealist works. Painted in 1942, the composition presents a fantastical, dream-like scene, using an extraordinary level of precision and attention to detail that renders the strange, otherworldly scene all the more uncanny and unsettling. Here, in a long, non-descript corridor, a pair of young girls dressed in sumptuous dresses and heeled boots attack the walls, tearing and ripping at the wallpaper with their hands to reveal a secret, hidden world of sensuous bodies and flesh beneath. A strong wind rips through the space, catching the tendrils of torn paper and tousling the girl’s hair and skirts, drawing our eyes to the brightly lit landscape seen through a window or doorway at the end of the corridor. In the foreground a third figure is partially glimpsed, her legs just visible alongside a strip of crumpled material at her feet, as if she has been knocked over while in the middle of the ‘game.’ There is a visceral sensuality in the play of different textures and colours within the composition, as Tanning invokes the contrasting feel of hair, skin, paper, fabric and leather, as the eye wanders through the image.
Born in Galesburg, Illinois, Tanning decided at the age of just seven that she would become a painter, and thereafter was determined to carve a different path beyond her family’s expectations for her to be a dutiful wife, mother, and churchgoer. Describing her hometown as a place where ‘nothing happened but the wallpaper,’ she found an escape through Gothic novels and poetry, which left an indelible impression on her imagination (quoted in ‘Dorothea Tanning: Exhibition Guide’ Tate, London, online; accessed 5 February 2026). Despite her parents’ opposition, she moved to Chicago to study fine art, and soon afterwards relocated to New York to continue her education, where she worked variously as an advertising illustrator, fashion model and a puppeteer. However, it was upon seeing Alfred H. Barr’s monumental exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936 that Tanning reached a break-through in her painting – as she later explained, the show was ‘the real explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels. Here is the infinitely faceted world I must have been waiting for. Here is the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY’ (Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 49). This experience opened up a rich, fantastical seam in her work, leading her to paint enigmatic self-portraits and compositions where young girls, exotic animals, and strange creatures met in bizarre encounters.
During the early 1940s, Tanning increasingly focused on exploring female sexuality and autonomous desire in her work, producing a series of important, thematically-linked paintings that show the transition from childhood into adolescence, and the growing self-awareness and eroticism of young women. In Children’s Games, the slight, diminutive bodies of the trio of female characters suggest they are young, pre-pubescent girls, invoking the Surrealist archetype of the femme-enfant. Rather than portraying these characters as passive muses, however, Tanning imbues her female protagonists with a clear sense of power and agency, physically attacking the domestic environment that threatens to confine them. Slightly dishevelled, their hair loose, their dresses torn and fluttering behind them, the girls are not presented as prim, doll-like characters. Instead they become what art historian Amy Lyford has described as miseducated young women, ‘who showed viewers how a young girl could, or should act, to explore her own passions and desires, and express her own sexual power’ (Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning, London, 2023, p. 97).
The interior space is transformed through the girls’ violent act, liberating the bodies that appear trapped within the hidden world behind the walls, charging the space with a powerfully frenetic energy. In many ways, the scene invokes the narrative of Lewis Carrol’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, the second instalment in the titular character’s adventures, in which the heroine tears through the mirror in her bedroom and finds herself transported to the nonsensical world of Looking Glass House. Carrol’s fantastical writing was an important touchstone for the Surrealists, appealing to their taste for dreams and the absurd. For Tanning, the adventures of Alice were inextricably bound to her first encounters with the Surrealist movement, particularly her memories of the exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936, where illustrations of the strange, wondrous beasts in Carrol’s stories were exhibited alongside paintings, sculptures and collages by contemporary Dada and Surreal artists. In Children’s Games, the girl in the foreground appears to echo the dramatic moment of transportation in Alice Through the Looking Glass, her hair streaming upwards dramatically into the rip she has made, as if she is about to be pulled into the vortex that has been revealed.
Children’s Games was included in the legendary ‘Exhibition by 31 Women,’ staged at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, in January 1943. This pioneering show – which featured works by leading contemporary female artists, including Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Kay Sage and Leonor Fini – was intend to showcase the dynamism and multiplicity of styles, ideas and themes, being pursued by women artists at this time. It was during preparations for the show that Tanning first met the German Surrealist Max Ernst, who visited her apartment one cold, wintery afternoon to select works for the exhibition. The encounter sparked a passionate love affair that would last for decades. Children’s Games was chosen for the Guggenheim show alongside Tanning’s renowned self-portrait, Birthday (1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and the two works were reproduced shortly thereafter in the Surrealist journal VVV, alongside Tanning’s short story Blind Date.
The painting was acquired directly from Tanning and Ernst in January 1948 by the legendary entertainer and queen of burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee, who was an avid collector of Surrealism and a close friend of the painter’s – Tanning later described her as ‘my first collector’ (Tanning, op. cit., 2001, p. 88). Extensively exhibited over the last eighty years, the painting was acquired by the current owner four decades ago, and has never before appeared at auction.
Born in Galesburg, Illinois, Tanning decided at the age of just seven that she would become a painter, and thereafter was determined to carve a different path beyond her family’s expectations for her to be a dutiful wife, mother, and churchgoer. Describing her hometown as a place where ‘nothing happened but the wallpaper,’ she found an escape through Gothic novels and poetry, which left an indelible impression on her imagination (quoted in ‘Dorothea Tanning: Exhibition Guide’ Tate, London, online; accessed 5 February 2026). Despite her parents’ opposition, she moved to Chicago to study fine art, and soon afterwards relocated to New York to continue her education, where she worked variously as an advertising illustrator, fashion model and a puppeteer. However, it was upon seeing Alfred H. Barr’s monumental exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936 that Tanning reached a break-through in her painting – as she later explained, the show was ‘the real explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels. Here is the infinitely faceted world I must have been waiting for. Here is the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY’ (Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 49). This experience opened up a rich, fantastical seam in her work, leading her to paint enigmatic self-portraits and compositions where young girls, exotic animals, and strange creatures met in bizarre encounters.
During the early 1940s, Tanning increasingly focused on exploring female sexuality and autonomous desire in her work, producing a series of important, thematically-linked paintings that show the transition from childhood into adolescence, and the growing self-awareness and eroticism of young women. In Children’s Games, the slight, diminutive bodies of the trio of female characters suggest they are young, pre-pubescent girls, invoking the Surrealist archetype of the femme-enfant. Rather than portraying these characters as passive muses, however, Tanning imbues her female protagonists with a clear sense of power and agency, physically attacking the domestic environment that threatens to confine them. Slightly dishevelled, their hair loose, their dresses torn and fluttering behind them, the girls are not presented as prim, doll-like characters. Instead they become what art historian Amy Lyford has described as miseducated young women, ‘who showed viewers how a young girl could, or should act, to explore her own passions and desires, and express her own sexual power’ (Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning, London, 2023, p. 97).
The interior space is transformed through the girls’ violent act, liberating the bodies that appear trapped within the hidden world behind the walls, charging the space with a powerfully frenetic energy. In many ways, the scene invokes the narrative of Lewis Carrol’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, the second instalment in the titular character’s adventures, in which the heroine tears through the mirror in her bedroom and finds herself transported to the nonsensical world of Looking Glass House. Carrol’s fantastical writing was an important touchstone for the Surrealists, appealing to their taste for dreams and the absurd. For Tanning, the adventures of Alice were inextricably bound to her first encounters with the Surrealist movement, particularly her memories of the exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936, where illustrations of the strange, wondrous beasts in Carrol’s stories were exhibited alongside paintings, sculptures and collages by contemporary Dada and Surreal artists. In Children’s Games, the girl in the foreground appears to echo the dramatic moment of transportation in Alice Through the Looking Glass, her hair streaming upwards dramatically into the rip she has made, as if she is about to be pulled into the vortex that has been revealed.
Children’s Games was included in the legendary ‘Exhibition by 31 Women,’ staged at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, in January 1943. This pioneering show – which featured works by leading contemporary female artists, including Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Kay Sage and Leonor Fini – was intend to showcase the dynamism and multiplicity of styles, ideas and themes, being pursued by women artists at this time. It was during preparations for the show that Tanning first met the German Surrealist Max Ernst, who visited her apartment one cold, wintery afternoon to select works for the exhibition. The encounter sparked a passionate love affair that would last for decades. Children’s Games was chosen for the Guggenheim show alongside Tanning’s renowned self-portrait, Birthday (1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and the two works were reproduced shortly thereafter in the Surrealist journal VVV, alongside Tanning’s short story Blind Date.
The painting was acquired directly from Tanning and Ernst in January 1948 by the legendary entertainer and queen of burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee, who was an avid collector of Surrealism and a close friend of the painter’s – Tanning later described her as ‘my first collector’ (Tanning, op. cit., 2001, p. 88). Extensively exhibited over the last eighty years, the painting was acquired by the current owner four decades ago, and has never before appeared at auction.