Review: Dorothea Tanning, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Richard Howard, Artforum
April 2001
Last year the Philadelphia Museum of Art purchased Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday, 1942, an early self-portrait in which the bare-breasted, bramble-skirted heroine, accompanied by an apparently benevolent minidragon (first of the animal demiurges so often inhabiting the artist’s future paintings), stands with her hand on the knob of a white door in an infinite regress of half-open portals. This acquisition has now been celebrated by curator Ann Temkin with a small show of paintings, objects, and drawings from Tanning’s long career, “a hidden treasure of modern art,” concluding with one of the dozen “imaginary flower portraits” painted in the artist’s eighty-eighth year. […]