Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202
1970-73
Installation
Fabric, wool, synthetic fur, cardboard, and Ping-Pong balls
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Tanning’s only large-scale installation, “Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202” was created for a retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1974. Two flesh pink torsos are climbing up the walls, ripping through the wallpaper, whilst others spout limbs from the furnishing. The room presents an intense feeling of confinement with the human presence merging with inanimate objects, suggesting a state of boredom or a desire to disappear.

The work points to the possibility of physical violence as experienced by women and the mental struggle of that trauma. Victoria Carruthers, an art historian, suggests Tanning was inspired by a popular song from her childhood that contained the lyrics –

In room two hundred and two
The walls keep talkin’ to you
I’ll never tell you what they said
So turn out the light and come to bed

Dorothea Tanning
Surrealism, Installation Art, Proto-Feminist Artists, Modern Sculpture
Born: 25 August 1910, Illinois, USA
Nationality: American
Died: 31 January 2012, New York, USA

Tanning was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Art pervades much of Tanning’s life; her images, objects, and texts have become worthwhile art and her very presence transformed photographs and moments in time to make them more artistic. The whirlwind energy that followed Tanning as a person is found in her brushstrokes. Tanning’s complete oeuvre is dominated by her unstoppable life force characteristics. Her ideas were too big for rural Illinois so Tanning left for Chicago and then New York. In New York, she found both the style and company that she identified as a Surrealist. She also married Max Ernst. Tanning meticulously depicted her own dreams throughout her long career. This psychological exploration of self continued as her work developed into the more abstract and sculptural.