Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World

Mahon’s study opens with Tanning’s uncanny self-portrait in the Arizona landscape in 1944, at a moment when the Surrealism that had emerged in Paris in the inter-wars years was ‘being reimagined on a truly global and gender-liberated scale and with international women artists advancing its discourse and modes of expression beyond its male-centric pre-war orthodoxies’. Mahon takes Tanning’s life and work as emblematic of this later, expansive, expression of Surrealism. Alyce Mahon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge and holds a PHD from the Courtauld Institute and is a leading scholar of the women artists associated with Surrealism. 264 Pages, 99 illustrations. 169 × 241 mm ISBN: 9780300244601 Published on 07 April 2026