Portfolio | Harvard Art Museums

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Order Image

Identification and Creation

Object Number: 24.2005
People: Dorothea Tanning, American (Galesburg, Illinois 1910 - 2012 New York, New York)
Title: Portfolio
Other Titles: Alternate Title: School Girl
Classification: Prints
Work Type: print
Date: 1992
Culture: American
Persistent Link: https://hvrd.art/o/48133

Physical Descriptions

Medium

Lithograph printed in colors, with folding portfolio element

Technique

Lithograph

Dimensions

greatest dimen.: 122.3 x 60.3 cm (48 1/8 x 23 3/4 in.)

Inscriptions and Marks

Signed: Dorothea Tanning
inscription: lower corners of back board, graphite, hand written, signed, in artist's hand: edition numbering, signature: P/P Dorothea Tanning

State, Edition, Standard Reference Number

Edition: P/P
Standard Reference Number: B. & M. p. 296

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line: Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Anonymous loan
Copyright: © The Dorothea Tanning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object Number: 24.2005
Division: Modern and Contemporary Art
Contact: am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
Permissions: The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. To request a higher resolution file of this image, please submit an online request.

Descriptions

Commentary: This lithograph is very much a latter-day Tanning, and she herself admits it is a retrospective self-portrait, according to the dealer from which this was purchased. The print shows Tanning as a young art student carrying her portfolio of drawings, which when opened proves to hold her psychic self, her self-projection as an erotic fantasy, naked from the waist down (whatever part of her body that does not show with the portfolio closed). She rides a red-feathered cyclopean humanoid of indeterminate sex which, in turn, rides a white avian creature on a perch; the red creature is wringing the neck of the white creature. Although Tanning shows herself at a very young age -- perhaps still an adolescent -- the monstrous birds suggest she is significantly older.

She moved to New York City in 1935 and in the 1940s met the surrealist painter Max Ernst, whom she would marry in 1946. Ernst characteristically personified his iconic motifs as savant bird forms, and thus this young girl riding high over two surrealist (in her own style) birds, in a tableau filled with sex and violence, must evoke her existence after the war, when she and Ernst lived in France for the most part.

Verification Level

This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu