SFMOMA, Part 19: Floor 2, section 1900 to Now.
On Floor 2, in the 1900 to Now galleries, there is a woman standing at the edge of the world in her underwear, and she is not looking at you.
She is looking at the rock. That is the whole painting, and it is everything.
Self-Portrait is small — 24 by 30 inches, the size of a carry-on suitcase — and it holds one of the strangest compositions in the museum. In the lower third, seen from behind, a young woman stands on a rocky ledge. She is nearly naked: a bra, a pair of underpants, bare legs, bare feet on stone. Her arms hang slightly away from her body, not posed, just standing. Her hair is up. You cannot see her face. In front of her and below her and above her — everywhere that is not her — the Arizona desert explodes outward: red-rock formations rising like cathedrals, green scrub filling the middle distance, a horizon that keeps going until the painting runs out of room. The rock is enormous. She is tiny. The ratio is the argument.
The color is the second shock. The rock formations are rust-red and ochre, lit the way desert rock gets lit at the hour when everything looks important. The sky is a pale, hot blue. And the woman — the woman is flesh-colored, ordinary, mortal, standing in the middle of all this geology like a period at the end of a very long sentence.
Dorothea Tanning painted Self-Portrait in 1944, in oil on canvas, and it measures 24 × 30 inches — 61.0 × 76.2 cm. SFMOMA acquired it in 2014, by exchange through a fractional gift of Shirley Ross Davis. It is currently on view on Floor 2 as part of 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection. The painting depicts the desert landscape near Sedona, Arizona, where Tanning and her husband, Max Ernst, vacationed and then lived.
The easy reading is that this is a surrealist landscape with a figure in it — the desert as dreamscape, the woman as the dreamer. But the subject is sharper than that. Self-Portrait is a painting about who gets to look. In 1944, in the surrealist circle Tanning had just married into, women were the things being looked at: the muses, the objects, the beautiful problems. Tanning painted herself as the one doing the looking — and then she turned her back on the viewer to do it. You do not get her face. You do not get her body as an offering. You get her gaze, pointed at the horizon, and you are not invited to share it. You are only allowed to watch her watch.
1944: The dare
Tanning later wrote about the painting, and the sentence is worth quoting whole: "In that camera-sharp place where planetary upheaval had left its signature: the now placid monuments that, as far as anyone out there cared, had been there forever, I would undertake — dare would be a truer word — to paint the unpaintable…. in the studio alone with my dream I would record it like a diary entry, just like that."
Dare is the truer word. Consider what she was daring. She was 34 years old, two years into knowing Max Ernst — one of the most famous surrealists alive — and she was painting the Arizona desert as a place where a woman stands alone, nearly naked, unafraid, and uninterested in the viewer. The surrealist men painted women as landscapes. Tanning painted herself as a person in front of a landscape, and the difference is the whole history of the century.
The composition has a famous ancestor: Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, the German Romantic painting of a man seen from behind, surveying the sublime. SFMOMA's own curator, Janet Bishop, has said exactly this — Tanning pictures herself "Caspar David Friedrich-style, from the back at the edge of a precipice." But the substitution matters more than the homage. Friedrich's wanderer is a man, fully clothed, mastering the view. Tanning's wanderer is a woman, nearly naked, dwarfed by the view — and she is not mastering it. She is meeting it. The painting's audacity is that it claims the sublime — the biggest, most masculine subject in the history of landscape painting — for a woman standing in her underwear on a rock.
And the underwear is doing work. A clothed figure would be a hiker, a tourist, a symbol. The bra and panties make her vulnerable and specific — this is a body, not an idea of a body — and they also make the painting quietly erotic in a way that has nothing to do with the viewer. She is not undressed for you. She is undressed because it is hot in Arizona and because the painting is, as she said, a diary entry. Diaries are not written for an audience.
1910–1930: Three weeks of art school
Dorothea Tanning was born August 25, 1910, in Galesburg, Illinois — the same small town Carl Sandburg came from, a place not known for producing surrealists. Her art education consisted of exactly three weeks at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art in 1930. Three weeks. Everything else she taught herself.
I keep coming back to this because it changes how you see the brushwork. Self-Portrait is exquisitely painted — the rock formations are rendered with a precision that looks almost photographic in places, the way Tanning described the desert as "camera-sharp." This is not the loose, gestural handling of someone who learned to paint in a classroom and then unlearned it. This is the handling of someone who taught herself by looking very hard at the world and at other paintings, and who decided that precision was her weapon. The self-taught painter paints like every painting might be a test. The test here is: can you make a rock formation look more real than a photograph, and then put a nearly naked woman in front of it, and have the woman be the subject?
1942–1946: The muse who wouldn't
In 1942, Tanning met Max Ernst. The story, as she told it, is that she was working on a painting, someone said the great surrealist was coming by the gallery, and she kept working. Ernst saw the painting, saw her, and the rest is art history. They married in 1946 — in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, which is the most surrealist sentence ever written.
The surrealist circle was not, as a rule, good for women. The movement's theory had a place for the feminine — the muse, the femme-enfant, the irrational irruption into masculine reason — but the place was decorative. The women who were actually making work — Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Meret Oppenheim, Kay Sage — spent the 1940s fighting to be seen as artists rather than accessories. Tanning's strategy was different from all of theirs, and Self-Portrait is the strategy in miniature: she did not argue with the gaze. She redirected it. The painting says: here is a woman, here is what she is looking at, and your looking at her is the least interesting thing in the frame.
This is why the painting's title matters. It is called Self-Portrait, not Woman in Desert or Sedona. The subject is herself — not her face, not her body, but her act of seeing. The self being portrayed is the observer.
1949–2012: France, New York, and then words
In 1949, Tanning and Ernst moved to France, where they lived until his death in 1976. She kept painting — moving away from the surrealist figuration of the 1940s toward something stranger and more personal, including a series of soft sculptures in the late 1960s and 1970s that look like furniture having nightmares. In 1980 she moved to New York. In the 1990s, after decades of studio art, she turned to writing and poetry, which she continued until her death. She died on January 31, 2012, at the age of 101.
A hundred and one. She outlived Ernst by 36 years, outlived the surrealist movement by half a century, and spent her last decades writing poems — as if the woman who had spent her life redirecting the gaze finally decided to use words to do the same thing. The late poems are good. Of course they are. She had been composing them in paint since 1944.
The painting, again
Back on Floor 2, back to the woman on the rock. SFMOMA's curators, when they acquired the painting in 2014, made it a top priority — Bishop has said Tanning became one of the names she and her colleagues most wanted for the collection. For the museum's reopening, they hung it next to a Georgia O'Keeffe from the same year, 1944, also painted in the Southwest — two women, two deserts, two completely different answers to the same landscape.
O'Keeffe's desert is abstracted, essentialized, turned into form. Tanning's desert is specific, geological, almost documentary — and then she puts herself in it, small and exposed, as the one human fact the landscape has to contend with. The O'Keeffe says: I have understood this place. The Tanning says: this place is bigger than me, and I am standing in it anyway.
Here is what I keep coming back to: the painting is 24 by 30 inches, and the landscape in it is infinite, and the woman in it is maybe four inches tall. The arithmetic of the composition is the arithmetic of the career. Dorothea Tanning spent 101 years being the small figure in front of enormous things — the surrealist movement, the desert, the century, the male gaze — and she never once stepped out of the frame. She just turned around, so you could see what she was looking at.
Go stand where she stood. The painting is hung at the height where her eye level meets yours. You will be looking at the back of her head, and past it, at the rock. For a second, the museum falls away, and it is just you and her and the desert, and you understand the dare. She painted the unpaintable. The unpaintable was herself, looking. 🌁
Timeline — Dorothea Tanning
1910 — born August 25, Galesburg, Illinois
1930 — three weeks at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art; otherwise entirely self-taught
1942 — meets Max Ernst; enters the surrealist circle on her own terms
1944 — paints Self-Portrait in Arizona
1946 — marries Ernst (double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner)
1949 — moves to France with Ernst; lives there until his death in 1976
1960s–70s — moves beyond surrealist figuration; makes soft sculptures
1980 — moves to New York
1990s — turns to writing and poetry
2012 — dies January 31, New York, at age 101
2014 — SFMOMA acquires Self-Portrait, by exchange through a fractional gift of Shirley Ross Davis
Today — Self-Portrait on view, Floor 2, 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection, 151 Third Street