The Shape-Shifter
Lauren Elkin, Tate Etc.
February 2019
Some years after Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) left New York to move to Arizona with her lover Max Ernst, she sublet her flat to her friend Teeny, and her husband Marcel Duchamp. ‘One of the droll results of this,’ she writes in her autobiography, ‘was that for a time there were four names on our brass letterbox down in the little entrance vestibule’: Matisse (Teeny had previously been Mrs Pierre Matisse), Ernst, Duchamp, Tanning. […]