When American artist Dorothea Tanning painted “Birthday” in 1942, she introduced her arrival – an inventive delivery, as she later described it – into the surrealist motion.
Surrealism is an avant-garde artwork and literary motion that started in Paris within the Nineteen Twenties and sought to unharness the subconscious thoughts. Ladies artists throughout the motion ceaselessly drew on its dreamlike language to counter male surrealists’ idealized and objectifying portrayals of girls, reclaiming their very own company and identification.
The motion’s centennial might be celebrated all over the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork’s “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100” exhibition, which opens Nov. 8, 2025, and runs thru Feb. 16, 2026.
As an artist, author and curator who makes a speciality of feminism in artwork historical past, I’m excited to look Tanning’s “Birthday” displayed in Philadelphia along works by way of canonical male surrealists reminiscent of Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. This juxtaposition invitations audience to reexamine surrealism throughout the contributions of girls like Tanning, in addition to Leonora Carrington and in all probability Remedios Varo.
Those girls introduced radical inventions to the motion. Their depictions of feminine reports of sexual awakening, home entrapment and psychic resistance added new intensity to the dreamscapes envisioned by way of their male contemporaries.
A gradual, unseductive gaze
‘Birthday,’ painted by way of American surrealist Dorothea Tanning in 1942.
Philadelphia Museum of Artwork
In “Birthday,” the artist paints herself bare-chested and dressed in an elaborate skirt composed of flowing, vinelike bureaucracy that intertwine with feminine figures, evoking an natural international someplace between plants and the ocean. She stands tall in a hall coated with doorways that appear to recede forever. Is she trapped in domesticity, or do the doorways constitute countless tactics out? She stares off, apparently on the painter, no longer the viewer. At her toes is a fantastical winged tom cat creature, its presence each companionable and uncanny.
The composition has many hallmarks of surrealism, together with dream common sense – the ordinary, flowing and ceaselessly illogical development of pictures reflecting the unpredictable nature of goals – metamorphosis and psychic ambiguity. Psychic ambiguity refers to an open-ended emotional or mental which means. It invitations a couple of interpretations and exudes the complexity of the unconscious.
However what distinguishes “Birthday,” individually, is its insistence on company.
Many surrealist artists forged girls as muses or dream figures conjured for the male gaze. Tanning, alternatively, puts herself on the middle. Her secure, unseductive gaze confronts the viewer and calls for reputation of her authorship.
French author and poet André Breton’s 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism” suggested artists to free up idea from rational constraint. Breton aimed to get entry to the subconscious thru dream and automatism, a surrealist methodology of making artwork with out mindful keep watch over, permitting spontaneous expression from the unconscious thoughts, loose from rational idea or aesthetic regulations.
An enchanting array of doorways
Past her self-portrait, “Birthday” depicts a apparently never-ending collection of doors. Tanning wrote about taking inspiration from her New York condo:
“I had been struck, one day, by a fascinating array of doors – hall, kitchen, bathroom, studio – crowded together, soliciting my attention with their antic planes, light, shadows, imminent openings and shuttings. From there it was an easy leap to a dream of countless doors.”
The “dream of countless doors” may just constitute the perpetual possible for trade and renewal, or the facility to go away doorways open for the creativeness, or alternatives past domesticity for girls.
Tanning refused to be confined by way of the label of “woman artist,” whilst her paintings bore feminist intensity. However, her art work modeled a type of self-determination that continues to resonate within the paintings of recent artists reminiscent of South African photographer Zanele Muholi and American mixed-media artist Mickalene Thomas.
In the long run, “Birthday” isn’t just a surrealist self-portrait; this is a threshold paintings. It situates the artist between recognized and unknown, rational and unconscious, constraint and liberation. For Tanning, it marked her personal creative delivery. For audience as of late, it marks a reminder that self-representation isn’t static however at all times in movement, reworking.
