Surrealist obsession<\/p>\n
From that moment, Tanning became so obsessed with Surrealism that in July 1939 she boarded a boat to Paris to attempt to meet its linchpins, a forlorn quest with Europe on the brink of war. Eventually, \u00e9migr\u00e9 Surrealists came to her New York, with spectacular results, as Mahon\u2019s book details.<\/p>\n
Although few artists would describe the cause and effect of such an experience as Tanning does, I am regularly reminded in my conversations with artists about exhibitions\u2019 capacity for revelation at similarly crucial moments. In a recent episode of the A brush with\u2026<\/a> podcast, Lorna Simpson, whose current show at the Pinault Collection\u2014Punta della Dogana in Venice coincides with the Venice Biennale<\/a>, describes an epiphany at the Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York at the end of 1987\u2014the last survey of a comparable size to the one that opened at the National Gallery in London<\/a> this month. \u201cThe scale of those images and their imposing message really stuck with me,\u201d Simpson says. \u201cIt was shocking for me to experience that, but not from a religious [perspective], just the body and the presentation of the body.\u201d She sees its effect on her \u201cearly photography of the singular figures that are lifesize and towering \u2026 or they\u2019re larger than life\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2018The Other Story\u2019<\/p>\n Meanwhile, for Hurvin Anderson<\/a>, whose mid-career survey is now at London\u2019s Tate Britain, two exhibitions in the early 1990s were of huge significance, for different reasons. He saw The Other Story, the artist Rasheed Araeen\u2019s exhibition of Asian, African and Caribbean artists in post-war Britain, among whose central concerns was \u201cthe question of cultural identity, of how these artists see their place in British art\u201d. It began at London\u2019s Hayward Gallery in 1989 before travelling to Wolverhampton, where Anderson saw it, and then Manchester. The Other Story\u2019s broad significance has only grown in recent years as the art world has begun to catch up in representing non-white artists. But at that time, it was of enormous personal importance to Anderson.<\/p>\n A mid-career survey of Hurvin Anderson is now at London\u2019s Tate Britain<\/p>\n Photo \u00a9 Tate<\/p>\n In 1991, he saw an exhibition whose influence was more formal: Richard Diebenkorn at London\u2019s Whitechapel Gallery. As the Whitechapel\u2019s then director, Catherine Lampert, wrote in a recent monograph on Anderson, the \u201clasting impression\u201d made by that exhibition derived in part because Diebenkorn, whose painting was suffused with the light of California, \u201cdisregarded the figuration\/abstraction polarisation\u201d\u2014a rich element in the poetry one finds in Anderson\u2019s canvases. I saw the Diebenkorn exhibition as an art student and was profoundly marked by it, never having previously seen a single painting by him (even now, not one is in a British museum collection). It is one of those exhibitions that was seen by relatively few people compared to many museum shows, but was adored by a significant proportion of its modest audience\u2014among them, very many artists.<\/p>\n In an age when exhibition revenue is increasingly fundamental to museums\u2019 survival, organisations still need to be bold in mounting not only predictable hits but also exhibitions that are less spectacularly transformative, like The Other Story and the Diebenkorn survey. While Anderson\u2019s magnificent exhibition might not draw the footfall of Tate Britain\u2019s recent Turner and Constable show<\/a>, I suspect that it too will provide its own version of the \u201climitless expanse of possibility\u201d that so shook Tanning\u2019s world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Exhibitions can transform lives. In her new book, Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World, Alyce Mahon discusses the seismic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":977946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,115492,77,4845,166253,4087,16,15],"class_list":["post-977945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-design","tag-dorothea-tanning","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-hurvin-anderson","tag-lorna-simpson","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=977945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/977946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=977945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=977945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=977945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/3c2b6adeccb6d748368ff28e4468e4171e217386-1068x1023.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n