Two Women Argue About Art

Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

I hope you like eavesdropping.  This is an imaginary conversation between two women, a mother and her art lecturer daughter, who are looking at Dorothea Tanning’s painting Eine kleine Nachtmusik and trying to decide what they think about it. 

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Dorothea Tanning, 1943

‘Do you like it?’

‘Yes!  I love it!  Dorothea Tanning is excellent.’

‘Who was she?’

‘American.  She saw surrealism at MoMA and dashed off to Paris with introductions to everyone, then had to come straight home because of the war.’

‘The Second World War?’

‘Yes, mum, obviously.  She did a lot of ballet costumes and advertising work but her paintings were amazing.  And she did soft sculpture, really early.  She might even have been the earliest.  She hooked up with Max Ernst and for once he stayed faithful—till death, in fact: she outlived him.’

‘Do you teach her on your course?’

‘Yes.  We look at this one, in fact: it’s amazing.  But I don’t say that to the students, I say it’s a highly representative example of hyper realism influenced by Alice in Wonderland and a painting done by a man (whose name I forget) of a snake coming up the staircase.’

‘But do you like it?’

‘Yes.  Why?  Don’t you?’

‘Well, the little girls.  They look…’

‘Sexy?’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Mum!  Don’t be so strait-laced.  I thought you were a radical feminist before you had me.’

‘I was.  That’s why I don’t like it.  If this was by a man you’d condemn it, wouldn’t you?  The high heels, the way the one on the left is leaning back with her top open and with her eyes shut like that?’

‘But that’s a surrealist thing: the femme-enfant.’

‘Come again?’

‘It’s French for child-woman.  They loved wild girls or brave little girls like Alice.  They wrote about the bold, fearless girl being an ideal of creative courage and how she was in touch with the unconscious, the hidden world.’

‘Who wrote about that?’

‘Breton, and some others I can’t think of right now because I haven’t got my notes.’

‘But did the women artists write about the child-woman?  Did they aspire to be children?’

‘No, mum.  They aspired to be artists.  Actually, Whitney Chadwick, the first feminist critic to write a book about women surrealists, said that the femme-enfant was the biggest obstacle for women to fully participate in the movement and that it worked to exclude them.’

‘I think I might agree with that.  I bet the men didn’t aspire to be children.  If it was so wonderful, why wasn’t childhood the aim for the male surrealists?’

‘Good point.  But Breton was all for rebellion against everything grown up, like a paid job that sucked the life out of you or the church that told you how to behave.  Not that long ago, Penelope Rosemont wrote that if you think the child-woman is sexist you just show your ignorance of surrealism because the child’s perspective was highly valued.’

‘And what about paedophilia?  Was that highly valued?’

‘Keep your voice down, mum.’

‘No, Jacqueline, I won’t.  I’ve read Lolita, and I’m amazed it’s still in print.’

‘You’d ban Nabokov?’

‘Well, no.  Not ban it, but…’

‘There is some pretty dodgy surrealist stuff actually, like Hans Bellmer's Doll.  Have you seen that?’

‘Do I want to?’

‘Maybe not.  There’s a series of photos of this doll.  Her limbs are dislocated and sometimes she has too many legs or she has no torso and no face.  Sometimes she has little-girl Mary Jane shoes and knee socks.  There’s even one where she’s tied to a tree and there’s a man lurking in the words.  They say Bellmer was identifying with the feminine, or else he was rebelling against the Nazi ideal of the perfect body.  But I can’t look at them.  Or at Duchamp’s Given: it’s a splayed-out headless female dummy and you have to look at her through a peephole.’

‘I don’t think I like the surrealists at all.  Give me a nice Constable.  Or Monet.  And if you must have a woman, what about those lovely pictures of babies with their mothers by Mary Cassatt?  I remember when you were just—’

‘Oh, no.  Don’t give up on surrealism just because of an old pervert or two!  There are so many brilliant women to discover: Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Lee Miller, Eileen Agar.  And Frida Kahlo, of course.’

‘Yes, I have heard of a couple of them.  Did they do the femme-enfant too?  Ha!  That sounds like a silly dance, doesn’t it?  Do the femme-enfant!  Like this!’

‘Stop it, mum, you’re embarrassing me.’

‘That’s my job; I’m your mother!  Seriously though, Jacks, why do you like this picture?  It says it’s called Eine kleine Nachtmusik—that’s a piece of classical music, isn’t it?‘

‘Mozart, yes.  Why do I like it?  Let’s see.  I love the weirdness.  The energy.  I like the yellow light from the open door—so mysterious—and the way it matches the sunflower.  I like the way the little girl in white is facing down the menace of the giant flower.  I like their long hair and how the girl in front is using hers to scare the flower away by shooting it upwards as if it’s a jet of water coming out of the top of her head.  I love the colours, and the story.  The way their skirts look more like torn paper or some sort of plant material.  And I’d definitely wear those lace-up boots!  See how the girl in the red top has a fallen petal in her hand?  Maybe it’s making her dreamy, or sleepy.  I agree it’s sexy, but it's strong too.  The girls are not there to be looked at, they’re in charge.’

‘The flower is very artistic, I suppose.’

‘Do you see how the doors have numbers?’

‘It’s a hotel corridor, then?’

‘Maybe.  And it could be a reference to the hotel where a gangster’s moll killed herself in Room 202 in 1893—there was a popular song about it going around in the 1920s.’

‘But this was painted in 1943 it says.’

‘Yes, but the Hôtel du Pavot, where it was meant to have happened, keeps on cropping up in Tanning’s work.  There’s an amazing installation with that title from around 1970: a whole room with figures bursting through the walls and out of the fireplace.’

‘Little girls again?’

‘No, women’s bodies in flesh-coloured material.’

‘So you think the child-woman is a positive image do you?’

‘I think it was quite advanced at the time.  France was all about getting women back in the kitchen and having babies after the First World War.  But the surrealists weren’t interested in obedient women and I think that helped the woman artists who joined them.  Also, in the 1930s, some of the women joining the group were only twenty or so, whereas the men—Breton, Ernst, Dalí—were all forty or more.’

‘So they were child women in comparison?’

‘Sort of.  Younger, anyway.’

‘What do you tell your students about the femme-enfant, then?’

‘Not much.  They’re really reactionary, like you, mum, and all they see is paedophilia.  They want to ban anything remotely dodgy.  It's social media.  You can’t risk anything these days.  That’s why surrealism is so important.’

‘If you say so, dear.  Isn’t it time for lunch?’