About this work
The Mirror
1950
Oil on canvas
12 x 18 1/4 in.
In her own words...
Alain Jouffroy: The figures that could be recognized in your early work are literally no longer identifiable. Are you consciously dealing with what could be called the exploding identity in people? How do you experience it?
Dorothea Tanning: I've been trying for a long time to deal with the figures that emerge on the canvas. Time is needed to know them. In the first years, I was painting our side of the mirror—the mirror for me is a door—but I think that I've gone over, to a place where one no longer faces identities at all. One looks at them somewhat obliquely, slyly. To capture the moment, to accept it with all its complex identities.
– 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.
– 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.
