Here are 10 things to know about Dorothea Tanning ...

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in the small town of Galesburg, Illinois in the United States. She died in 2012 in New York, aged 101. Amazingly, she continued to create art and poetry until the end of her life.

Tanning knew that she wanted to be an artist from a young age. She briefly attended classes at The Chicago Academy of Art but rebelled against the formal art education. Instead she spent her time amongst the paintings in The Chicago Art Institute. Hoping to pursue a career as an artist, Tanning moved to New York where she worked as a freelance illustrator.

Surrealism, which emerged in Paris in the 1920s, explored the hidden workings of the mind. In 1936, Tanning visited the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This was her first experience of surrealism. She described the experience as ‘momentous’, saying: ‘I thought, Gosh! I can go ahead and do what I've always been doing'.

In 1939, she sailed to Paris, hoping to meet surrealists there. However, Tanning was forced to return to New York because of the outbreak of the Second World War. The war brought many European surrealists writers and artists to the city as cultural refugees.

During her lifetime, Tanning worked as illustrator, painter, print maker, sculptor and set and costume designer. She created a variety of art, from her fantastical scenes of the 1940s, to her more abstracted paintings of the mid-1950s.

During the late 1960s Tanning started to make sculptures out of fabric. These are known as soft sculptures. Tanning gathered the fabric for these works from charity shops and stuffed them with wool. Sewn on her Singer sewing machine, they appear as bizarre, body-like shapes. In the artwork Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 1970–73, Tanning brought several of these eerie, human forms together into an unsettling sculptural installation. Bodies break through the wallpaper and merge into furniture.

In 1942, artist Max Ernst was introduced to Tanning through the gallerist Julien Levy. Ernst was helping his then-wife Peggy Guggenheim on a major exhibition of women artists she was planning. He saw Tanning’s self-portrait Birthday 1942 on her easel in her apartment and suggested its title to mark her ‘birth’ as a surrealist artist. The painting was selected for the exhibition and within a week Ernst had moved into Tanning’s apartment. In 1946, they were married in a double ceremony with the artist, Man Ray and dancer, Juliet Browner.

Tanning was a strong believer in equality. Similarly, she didn’t want to be defined by her relationship with artist Max Ernst, stating ‘I never heard him use the word “wife” in regard to me. He was very sorry about that wife thing.’

In her later years Tanning became an accomplished writer, publishing two collections of poetry, two memoirs and a novel. Her final collection of poetry, Coming to That, was published at the age of 101.

After leaving Galesburg in pursuit of a career as an artist, Tanning lived in Chicago and New York, later making trips to New Orleans, San Francisco and Sweden for exhibitions and to visit family.

By the mid-1940s, Tanning and Max Ernst moved to Sedona, Arizona where they built a house and spent much of the next decade. Surrounded by lizards, scorpions and snakes, Tanning described Arizona as a ‘landscape of wild fantasy’. They were visited by many other creatives here including poet Dylan Thomas, artist Marcel Duchamp and photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

In 1957, Tanning and Ernst moved permanently to the south of France. They stayed there until his death in 1976.

The image of the dog – often based on Max Ernst’s pet, a Lhasa Apso named Katchina – reappears in Tanning’s work. Sometimes she used the image of the dog playfully to represent herself.