Etched Murmurs

Date1984

Credit LineGift of Josue Harari

Dimensions11 11/16 x 9 1/16 in. (29.7 x 23 cm)

Object number1992.004.003

Label TextThe American Dorothea Tanning first discovered the Surrealist movement, which she has called a "quivering experiment in psychic discovery," at the Museum of Modern Art's 1936 exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism. With the advent of World War II, many of the Surrealist writers and artists fled to New York from France, and Tanning found that the exiled movement had arrived on her doorstep. She met Max Ernst in 1942, marrying him in 1946.

In her earliest works illusionistically depicted figures, usually young girls, participate in strange, dream-like activities that take place in settings constructed according to a rational perspective. By the end of the 1950s this sense of spatial logic dissolved into an indistinct, all-enveloping atmosphere, and the human figure, usually still female, underwent a structural dissolution. In this print, disarticulated and amorphous bodies engage in interlocking embraces. These figures are apparitions in the process of materializing rather than creatures of solid flesh. Head or limbs are not so much amputated, as elided in a kind of anatomical shorthand. These are bodies experienced from within, rather than observed from without. One figure in Etched Murmurs--its arms upraised, elbows bent, and hands resting on the top of the head--can also be read as an image of the eye. This seems to be an emblem of the involvement of the entire body in the process of perception. Tanning vehemently rejects the labeling of her work as purely erotic, for the figures she imagines do not merely express sexual pleasure but rather refer to the whole range of sensation associated with inhabiting a human body.
Exhibition HistorySurreal Anatomies, Michael C. Carlos Museum, October 7, 2000 - January 28, 2001

ProvenanceEx coll. Josue Harari (1944-2014), Atlanta, Georgia.

Status

Not on view

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