You wait decades for an exhibition of erotically-tinged flower paintings by important twentieth-century American female artists (don’t you?), and then two show up at once. Like sexy, arty buses. The Tate has its Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective, and now Alison Jacques Gallery has just opened a show of surrealist Dorothea Tanning’s late-career paintings. Although she’s arguably still best known as the wife of modern art giant Max Ernst, Tanning outlived him by nearly 40 years, and in many ways deserves as much recognition as her hubby.
In the late 1990s, Tanning was struck by a vision of a purple-coloured flower that she immediately committed to canvas. More soon followed, eventually becoming a series of 12. Six of them are on display here, alongside a number of preparatory drawings. Tanning painted from the mind’s eye, rather than life, and there’s something innately otherworldly about her creations. And what’s really interesting is just how varied they are: some resemble mollusc-like creatures; others, the landscapes of alien planets. In terms of their eroticism, they’re not massively fanny-like, but with their coiling stems, jagged petals and stamens rising like plumes of vapour, they possess a fierce, troubling kind of fecundity. Seriously: forget all those preconceptions about old ladies only painting twee pictures of hyacinths.
Since they were only ever intended as sketches for the paintings, the drawings are inevitably less exciting. But they do reveal that for all the alleged compulsion behind the paintings, they were still masterfully composed and worked out. Where the O’Keeffe show is a sweeping survey of a whole career, this is a smaller-scale, more intimate window into a period of feverish creativity by a supremely accomplished artist in her eighties. And, for my money, it’s way better.