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Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
DOROTHEA TANNING Birthday (Self Portrait at Age 30).
Color offset lithograph. 573x363 mm; 22 1/2x14 1/4 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 90/150 in pencil, lower margin. A superb impression with vibrant colors.
Based on Tanning's (1910-2012) oil on canvas, Birthday, 1942, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Tanning (1910-2012) was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois. After two years of college, she left to pursue an artistic career, moving first to Chicago in 1930 and then to New York in 1935, where she supported herself as a commercial artist while working on her own painting. In New York, Tanning discovered Surrealism at The Museum of Modern Art's 1936 exhibition, "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism." In 1941, she was introduced to the gallery owner and champion of Dada and Surrealism, Julien Levy, who offered to show her work. Levy gave Tanning two solo exhibitions (in 1944 and 1948), and also introduced her to the circle of émigré Surrealists whose work he was showing in his New York gallery, including the German painter, Max Ernst.
Tanning and Ernst were married in 1946 in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Hollywood, California. They lived initially in New York, then Sedona, Arizona, and, in 1949, relocated to France. As Tanning recounts in her memoirs, Ernst, who was 19 years her senior, was first enchanted by her iconic self-portrait Birthday (Self Portrait at Age 30), painted around the time she and Ernst first met.
