Alain Jouffroy:   Is that the special kind of violence in your work, the violence of bodies rebelling, rising, to confront an enemy as it were. What is that enemy?

Dorothea Tanning:  Civilization, you might say. But these bodies are more of an affirmation. They may be symbolic of violence, but also of the ferociousness of encounters, of the wonderful will of human beings to prove their ancestry over the forces of so-called civilization.

     --from “Interview with Dorothea Tanning" in Dorothea Tanning, retrospective exhibition catalogue, Malmö, Sweden: Malmö Konsthall, 1993, p. 57.   This interview was originally published as "Questions pour Dorothea Tanning entretien avec Alain Jouffroy, Mars 1974,” in Dorothea Tanning: Oeuvre, retrospective exhibition catalogue, Paris: Centre National D'Art Contemporain, 1974.