SELF INVENTIONS.(Surrealist artist and poet Dorothea Tanning at 93.)(Interview)(Biography)

In the summer of 1928, when the poet and painter Dorothea Tanning was eighteen and inching her way out of Galesburg, Illinois--a town of twenty-seven thousand Christian souls, twenty-four churches, and a public library where, under cover of a part-time job, she had lost herself to the siren song of Art, to Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe and Laurence Sterne and all the other writers whose catalogue numbers the librarian had flagged with a small red cross, for "immoral"--she used her savings to rent a cabin in the woods, about an hour from town, on a lake with the memorable name of Bracken. She told her family that she wanted to be alone, a sentiment that did not resonate in Galesburg. (" 'Alone' can be unhappy, but it's not bad for you," she likes to say.) And, indeed, no sooner had she settled into the cabin and laid out pad, pencils, crayons, and watercolors on the deal table than the visits from home started. Her two sisters, sent by their mother to make sure she ate, arrived with a pecan pie. Her three best friends, perhaps suspecting a boy, arrived--their curiosity, as she wrote in a memoir sixty years later, floating around the cabin in "a positively miasmal drift, a heady effluvium that mingled with the reek of crushed verdure and lake water." Finally, the boy arrived, tennis racquet in hand and, apparently, so aroused by the sight of four camp beds, lined up chastely in the cabin's one room, that he was struck speechless. Tanning says she sent them all packing.

This is a very Tanning story. Her biographers cite it as the moment when Dottie Tanning, of Galesburg, became Dorothea Tanning--"that moment when, linked to youth's innermost thrust, a life allies itself with an imperative and inevitable force," the French critic Jean-Christophe Bailly put it, in a particularly steamy essay on Tanning's "leap" into a future "guided by art's conscious hand." But what really makes it a Tanning story is less the solemnity of her resolve than its crafty charm. Dottie Tanning, at eighteen, was already so brilliantly and exotically and unflinchingly American in her impulse to self-invention that, with only a slight adjustment to the miasmal drift, she could have been Daisy Miller, setting out on a treacherous Rome night for the Colosseum. At ninety-three, Tanning is still working on what, by any standards, has been a gallant and glamorous life, revisiting it here and there to make it more enticing. "A piece of art," one of her friends describes her, in a tone somewhere between exasperation and awe. "In process." She would be pleased. The epigraph for her first collection of poems--it's called "A Table of Content" and comes out in June--reads, "It's hard to be always the same person." (She thinks it's from "somewhere in Montaigne.") The critic John Russell has referred to "the several selves of Dorothea Tanning," and the poet W. S. Merwin puts it this way: "She goes out of the room, comes back, and she's someone else--and after a few hours I think, Phew, that'll do for a while!" Keeping her friends off balance is what keeps Tanning on her toes, which isn't a bad place, at any age, to be.

The poet Richard Howard, whom Tanning counts as one of her closest friends (and intends to make her literary executor), says, "Like Marianne Moore, she is a woman of studied originality." She wants to get it right for posterity. The collector Helen Heekin, who is so solicitous of Tanning that she sends her toffee-chip ice cream, FedEx priority, from Graeter's, in Cincinnati, likes to say that, given the chance, Tanning would be breaking into museums in the middle of the night--into the Tate Modern, say, where her famous 1970 pink wool sculpture "Reclining Nude" sits in a big Plexiglas box in the "subversive objects" gallery, or into the Philadelphia Museum, which is rumored to have paid close to a million dollars last year for her 1942 Surrealist self-portrait "Birthday"--to add a stitch or adjust a hairdo. Tanning herself admits to "fiddling" so anxiously with her poetry that she will fax an editor in the middle of the night to change a word in a poem she's already pulled from publication five times--and, if the editor complains, will withdraw it completely, for its "safety," as if the poem were in danger of being humiliated, or kidnapped. Tanning has even been said to have revised her waistline in a snapshot. So I was not surprised to discover, in a box of photographs labelled "1910s and 1920s," in her Tribeca studio, a certain revision of her solitude: a lovely picture of the artist sitting on a camp cot in a cabin on one of the Galesburg lakes, nude to the hips, back to the camera, and arms raised as if she'd just been caught, unaware, in the act of slipping off her shirt. I've known her for twenty-five years, but I wouldn't dream of asking who took it. Maybe she did.

Dorothea Tanning is sometimes called the oldest living Surrealist painter, though, as she says, "it's been half a century since I played at Surrealism for ten or twelve years" and then moved on to something else, something "less obvious" and "more contemplative and reflective and experimental." ("I wanted to make the most Surrealist paintings I could, and I did, and now I've had fifty more years of painting" is a remark she makes to someone almost daily.) Tanning completed her last oil in 1997 and her last big drawing (more accurately, a watercolor with collage) in 1999, and now devotes herself entirely to writing. She prefers the description "emerging poet." "Oldest living emerging poet," she will say when she's among friends, lifting a glass--champagne is served at Tanning's from five to seven, when "Jeopardy" starts--and flashing a ravishing smile. The smile, like Surrealism, is not something you allude to lightly. Tanning is still so sensitive to the prejudices, real and imagined, she suffered as "a pretty girl who 'also' painted" that she keeps a folder marked "Sass, etc." (cross-referenced with one marked "Dorothea's letters: some of them, see Sass"), the better to enjoy her most withering replies to the art critics and, in many cases, the admirers who have at one time or another referred to her with words like ravishing. Never mind that her beauty is as indisputable as her talent: wide blue eyes, perfect red moue of a mouth, skin the color of white French peaches. Or that she was never oblivious of her appeal. (At sixty-four, ...