Exquisite Dreams

Amy Lyford’s richly illustrated Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning makes a thoroughly convincing case for the importance of a woman who was considerably more than a Surrealist, the label attached to her from the start of her multifaceted career … Exquisite Dreams offers trenchant observations and analyses as it traces Tanning’s career … this book is both a scholar’s magnum opus and a lover’s report, the result of intensely responsive looking at her subject’s work. * Wall Street Journal *A critical study of Tanning’s art-making that seeks to expand our understanding of the richness and depth of Tanning’s career … Lyford also lends a thoughtful feminist interpretation to Tanning’s work where young girls were a recurring motif. * New City Lit *Stunning. That adjective just about does it … In Amy Lyford’s magnificently comprehensive and comprehending pages, there is no point at which one thinks: ‘Oh, why can’t she stop here?’ How greatly do I admire both the patience and the skill of vision in Amy Lyford’s work … How glad we are, all of us reading this grand biography, that the author did continue. – Mary Ann Caws * The Brooklyn Rail *Amy Lyford’s interpretive biography Exquisite Dreams covers artist Dorothea Tanning’s life and remarkable range of work … Lyford details her elusive yet purposeful versatility and her incorporation of “popular culture, advertising, literature, film, and the messiness and pleasures of a vivid, engaging social life into her art.” Rich images of Tanning’s works are featured alongside photographs of the artist that capture her playful sense of glamour … With revelatory eloquence, Exquisite Dreams chronicles Dorothea Tanning’s unique and faceted artistic career. – Meg Nola * Foreword Reviews *Lyford sets out to show the ways in which being both a woman and a Surrealist informed Tanning’s career even while she chafed at being pigeonholed in both categories. She dives deeply into Tanning’s archives and emerges with everything from advertising art created by Tanning for Macy’s to the draft of a storyboard for an autobiographical film. All of it is relevant to this intensely focused critique of Tanning’s oeuvre … it is lavishly illustrated and reproduces several archival documents. * ARLIS/NA Reviews *Amy Lyford has shaped a plethora of archival information into a story of Dorothea Tanning’s life and works. Exquisite Dreams is a highly readable page turner that engages fully with Tanning’s canny critiques of gender and sexuality and illuminates the complexities of Tanning’s life showing Tanning to be one of the most intriguing artists of the twentieth century. * Jennifer Shaw, Sonoma State University, author of Exist Otherwise *A luxurious dream of a book which offers refreshing critical depth to Dorothea Tanning studies. Alongside painting and sculpture, Lyford’s eloquent analysis reveals Tanning’s cinematic imagination, the enduring significance of her commercial illustrations and the environmental vitality of her little-known screenplay Unheard-of News. * Catriona McAra, Lecturer in Art History, University of Aberdeen *I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book for two reasons: (1) The book is nicely produced, generously illustrated, and very well written. (2) Lyford gives us a thorough and revealing look at Tanning’s life and detailed analysis of her varied artistic output … refreshingly free from remote psychoanalytical assumptions, and free from postmodern theoretical speculation. A breath of fresh air! … This book does a wonderful job of showing Tanning, the artist and woman, “warts and all,” and fills many gaps in previous works about this unique, amazing artist. * Leonardo *

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 and Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930-1950.