Sunday, March 03, 2024, 6.30pm to 8.00pm UK time (Please check your own time zone).

You are warmly invited to the launch of Amy Lyford’s book, Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning, published December 2023 by Reaktion Books.

Register for the event here.

Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) has for decades been known primarily as a Surrealist, but Exquisite Dreams shows how the work of this passionate, dynamic, and voraciously curious artist is impossible to categorize. Tanning’s lesser-known but equally powerful sculptures, abstract paintings, and films are explored here, and her writings, biography, and art are examined in the contexts of twentieth-century developments in advertising, fashion, popular culture, and art in New York and Paris.

Using new archival sources and analyses of Tanning’s work in a variety of media, Amy Lyford broadens our understanding of the artist and illuminates her stunning diversity and achievement. This richly illustrated book is an important contribution to the history of women artists, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as the history of Surrealism.

Amy Lyford is the Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is the author of Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (University of California Press, 2007) and Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930–1950 (University of California Press, 2013).

Find more information on Amy Lyford on her Occidental College page and her author Instagram: @amylyfordauthor

You can purchase the book in the UK here and the US here.