.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A seminal painting in Dorothea Tanning’s oeuvre, Le mal oublié marks a turning point and the beginning of a new phase for the artist. Often referred to as prismatic or kaleidoscopic, this innovative mature period is a true departure from earlier applications of surrealism. In the mid-1950s and commencing with this picture, Tanning adopts a new vocabulary inching closer to abstraction, focusing less on detailed fantastical scenes in favor of freer, multicolored compositions. Even in the most fractured canvases executed in this style, Tanning held onto effigies of figuration. This balance between figuration and abstraction in Tanning’s career was recently highlighted in an exhibition at the Kasmin Gallery, New York, entitled, Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Paint Say It All?.
The artist has stated: “Around 1955, my canvases literally splintered. Their colors came out of the closet, you might say, to open the rectangles to a different light. They were prismatic, surfaces where I veiled, suggested and floated my persistent icons and preoccupations, in another of the thousand ways of saying the same things” (quoted in Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 178). After years spent on and off in Sedona, Tanning and her husband, Max Ernst, purchased a property in Huismes in 1954. This farmhouse in the Loire Valley remained their home for the next decade and lay witness to fruitful creativity for both artists. From a photograph taken by Lee Miller in Tanning’s studio, it can be confirmed that this work was painted at Huismes.
Jean Christophe Bailly wrote on the present work, “Here there is no abrupt caesura—nor is there any amputation of early obsessions and a way of painting them. There is no visible break in her concentration on images of rather Gothic melancholy charm and their pervasive mood of uneasiness. Early preoccupations will show up in the entire oeuvre, in tonalities, in skewed architecture, in moods; above all, in their isolation. Nonetheless, there are distinct changes in the artist’s approach to her canvases. Connected one after the other by tenuous filaments, the paintings ranging from Le mal oublié (1955) to Les chiens de Cythère (1963), share Dorothea Tanning’s vision of her world as a kaleidoscope of restless forms, vast community of inflections that prismatically reveal and conceal the layers of her consciousness. In Le mal oublié, yellow gold like pollen seems to fill the blue rectangle, haloing its figural center, a child who kneels at lower right. Prismatic, even evanescent, the memory-figure will from now on occupy rather than dominate. It will be a blossoming within the confines of a painted world just as chance and our (all too human) reference will form a face or other known image in clouds moving across the sky” (op. cit., 1995, p. 29).
The Jacobses purchased Le mal oublié in 1959 from William and Noma Copley. Shortly after this acquisition, Mel and Roz met the artist through the Copleys and became lifelong friends, corresponding with her through heartfelt letters and postcards. Ahead of her first major retrospective in 1974 at the Centre nationale d’art contemporain in Paris, Tanning contacted the Jacobses to loan their picture and invited them to the vernissage, writing: “In any case this is my big moment (maybe you’ll be here? May 28), a kind of official consecration of a life of painting.”
The artist has stated: “Around 1955, my canvases literally splintered. Their colors came out of the closet, you might say, to open the rectangles to a different light. They were prismatic, surfaces where I veiled, suggested and floated my persistent icons and preoccupations, in another of the thousand ways of saying the same things” (quoted in Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 178). After years spent on and off in Sedona, Tanning and her husband, Max Ernst, purchased a property in Huismes in 1954. This farmhouse in the Loire Valley remained their home for the next decade and lay witness to fruitful creativity for both artists. From a photograph taken by Lee Miller in Tanning’s studio, it can be confirmed that this work was painted at Huismes.
Jean Christophe Bailly wrote on the present work, “Here there is no abrupt caesura—nor is there any amputation of early obsessions and a way of painting them. There is no visible break in her concentration on images of rather Gothic melancholy charm and their pervasive mood of uneasiness. Early preoccupations will show up in the entire oeuvre, in tonalities, in skewed architecture, in moods; above all, in their isolation. Nonetheless, there are distinct changes in the artist’s approach to her canvases. Connected one after the other by tenuous filaments, the paintings ranging from Le mal oublié (1955) to Les chiens de Cythère (1963), share Dorothea Tanning’s vision of her world as a kaleidoscope of restless forms, vast community of inflections that prismatically reveal and conceal the layers of her consciousness. In Le mal oublié, yellow gold like pollen seems to fill the blue rectangle, haloing its figural center, a child who kneels at lower right. Prismatic, even evanescent, the memory-figure will from now on occupy rather than dominate. It will be a blossoming within the confines of a painted world just as chance and our (all too human) reference will form a face or other known image in clouds moving across the sky” (op. cit., 1995, p. 29).
The Jacobses purchased Le mal oublié in 1959 from William and Noma Copley. Shortly after this acquisition, Mel and Roz met the artist through the Copleys and became lifelong friends, corresponding with her through heartfelt letters and postcards. Ahead of her first major retrospective in 1974 at the Centre nationale d’art contemporain in Paris, Tanning contacted the Jacobses to loan their picture and invited them to the vernissage, writing: “In any case this is my big moment (maybe you’ll be here? May 28), a kind of official consecration of a life of painting.”