Alyce Mahon on Dorothea Tanning

Alyce Mahon on Dorothea Tanning

From The Great Women Artists by Katy Hessel

April 14, 2026 · 50 min

About this episode

Alyce Mahon discusses the life and work of Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning.

TODAY on the GWA Podcast, is art historian, Alyce Mahon discussing the great Surrealist, Dorothea Tanning. Born in Illinois in 1910, where she said “nothing happened but the wallpaper”, Tanning immersed herself in gothic literature to escape to other worlds. Travelling to Paris to hunt down the Surrealists, Tanning “entered” or “birthed” herself into art in 1942 with her self-portrait “Birthday”, which sees her bare-breasted and standing in front of slightly ajar doors that seemingly lead to nowhere. Settling in NYC, where she exhibited with Peggy Guggenheim, it was then to the wide-open landscape of Sedona Arizona, where she painted Caspar David Friedrich-like paintings of herself standing before nature – ”asserting the centrality of woman” (as Mahon wrote in her new book). She then returned to postwar France and, switching up her style, moved into a cloud-like and splintered abstractions, before turning to bodily-like soft-sculptures. Although she famously said, "don’t ask me to explain my paintings". Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, Mahon is one of the leading scholars on Surrealism in the world today. The…

People in this episode

Host: Katy Hessel

Guest: Alyce Mahon

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Trinity College, University of Cambridge

Books & works: Birthday, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968, Eroticism & Art, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde

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