Dorothea Tanning

William N. Copley, Paris and New York (acquired by 1958)

Ira Genstein and Tonian Volk Genstein, Pennsylvania (acquired by 1974)

Byron Gallery, New York 

Acquired from the above by 1976 by the present owner

New York, Alexandre Iolas Gallery, Dorothea Tanning, 1953, no. 9

Paris, Galerie Daniel Cordier, Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (EROS), 1959-60, n.n.

Santa Barbara, The Art Gallery, University of California, Surrealism: A State of Mind, 1924-1965, 1966, no. 32 (dated 1952)

Knokke-le-zoute, Casino Communal, XXe Festival Belge D'Été, Dorothea Tanning, 1967, no. 16 

Paris, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Dorothea Tanning, 1974, no. 16, p. 26, illustrated; n.p.

New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Surrealism in Art, 1975 (not included in the catalogue)

New York, Gray Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, Tracking the Marvelous, 1981, no. 29, p. 35, illustrated 

Malmö Konsthall, Dorothea Tanning, 1993, pp. 21-23 and 135; p. 46, illustrated in color

London, Camden Arts Centre, Dorothea Tanning: Works 1942-1992, 1993 

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 243, p. 317; pp. 318-19, illustrated in color

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dorothea Tanning: “Birthday and Beyond,” 2000-01

Patrick Waldberg, Max Ernst, 1958, Paris, p. 353, illustrated; p. 354

Patrick Waldberg, Le Surréalisme, Geneva, 1962, p. 114, illustrated in color 

Dorothea Tanning, “Note Bibliographique,” Dorothea Tanning, Paris, 1966, p. 153 

Alain Bosquet, La peinture de Dorothea Tanning, Paris, 1966, p. 62, illustrated

“Tanning,” Dictionnaire Universel de l’Art et des Artistes, vol. 3, Paris, 1967, p. 442 (dated 1952)

René Passeron, Encyclopédie du Surréalisme, Paris, 1975, p. 245

Gilles Plazy; Jean Saucet, ed., Dorothea Tanning, Paris, 1976, pp. 24-25, illustrated in color; p. 33

Patrick Waldberg, “Dorothea Tanning: La Mémoire Ensorcelée,” Les Demeures d’Hypnos, Paris, 1976, p. 320

Marcel Duhamel, “Quarante ans de corps à corps avec la peinture,” Dorothea Tanning: Numéro Spécial de XXe Siècle, Paris, 1977, p. 112

John Russell, “Le ‘Moi’ multiforme de Dorothea Tanning,” Dorothea Tanning: Numéro Spécial de XXe Siècle, Paris, 1977, p. 56

Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art; University Art Museum, The University of Texas at Austin; Carnegie Museum Institute of Art, Pittsburgh (and traveling), Women Artists: 1550–1950, 1976-77, p. 338

Marianne Oesterreicher-Mollwo, Surrealism and Dadaism: Provocative Destruction, the Path within and the Exacerbation of the Problem of a Reconciliation of Art and Life, Oxford, 1979, p. 93 (titled Interior Scene Accompanied by Sudden Joy and dated 1952)

Jacques Baron, Anthologie plastique du surréalisme, Paris, 1980, p. 254, illustrated in color

Wieland Schmied, “KUNSTmonographie Dorothea Tanning: Die Türen des Unbewussten,” KUNSTmagazin, no. 89, June 1980, p. 24; p. 27, illustrated

John Russell, “Art: Exploding Canvases of Elizabeth Murray… [and] Other exhibitions of interest: ‘Tracking the Marvelous’,” The New York Times, 8 May 1981, p. C20

Norman Weinstein, “Shadows of Eros: Notes on Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealism,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, 1981, pp. 141-43

Adam Biro and René Passeron, eds., Dictionnaire Général du Surréalisme et de ses Environs, Fribourg, 1982, p. 398

Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, Santa Monica, 1986, p. 84, pl. 16, illustrated

“Oral History Interview with Dorothea Tanning, conducted by Barbara Shikler, July 11–November 5, 1990,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990, p. 155

Bengt Eriksson, “Hundar, hundar överallt,” Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 28 April 1993

Hans Johansson, “Dorothea Tanning,” Beckerell, no. 2, April/May 1993, p. 41; p. 43, illustrated

Lyn MacRitchie, "Painting is life or death, every time," Financial Times, October 9-10, 1993, p. 23

Robert Radford, “Dorothea Tanning,” Art Monthly, no. 171, November 1993, p. 26

Jean-Christophe Bailly, “Image Redux: The Art of Dorothea Tanning,” Dorothea Tanning, New York, 1995, pp. 18 and 22-24; pl. 29, pp. 72-73, illustrated in color color; p. 96, illustrated

Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy, New York, 1999, illustrated in color on the cover (detail); p. 79

Annette Shandler Levitt, The Genres and Genders of Surrealism, New York, 1999, pp. 104-07

Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York and London, 2001, n.p., illustrated; pp. 140 and 152-53

Richard Howard, “Dorothea Tanning: Philadelphia Museum of Art” Artforum, vol. 39, no. 8, April 2001, p. 135

Joy Press, “Books: The Tanning Salon,” The Village Voice, vol. XLVI, no. 35, 4 September 2001, p. 65

Katharine Conley, “Les révolutions de Dorothea Tanning,” Pleine Marge: Cahiers de littérature, d’arts plastiques, & de critique, no. 36, December 2002, pp. 148; 159-65 and 169; p. 160, illustrated in color

Jürgen Pech, “Hinter den Türen des Werkes von Dorothea Tanning,” Mythen–Symbole–Metamorphosen in der Kunst seit 1800: Festschrift für Christa Lichtenstern zum 60. Geburtstag, Berlin, 2004, pp. 372-73

Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Malingue, “Grands” Surréalistes, 2008, p. 48

Victoria Carruthers, “Between Silence and Sound: John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Sculptures of Dorothea Tanning,” Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, Surrey, 2010, p. 100

Victoria Carruthers, “Dorothea Tanning and Her Gothic Imagination,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 5, nos. 1-2, 2011, p. 141

Katharine Conley, Surrealist Ghostliness, Lincoln, 2013, pp. 139, illustrated, pp. 144 and 146

Gabriela Glăvan, “Corrupt Childhood. Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend,” British and American Studies, vol. XXII, 2016, pp. 58-59

“Reinventing The Marriage Between Heaven and Hell: Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde,” A Serious Genre: The Apology of Children’s Literature, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2016, p. 199

“Verbal Dreamscapes. Dorothea Tanning’s Visual Literature,” Romanian Journal of English Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, December 2016, p. 111

Catriona McAra, A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm, Abingdon, 2017, pp. 25, 39-40 and 97; pl. 7, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and London, Tate Gallery, Dorothea Tanning, 2018-19, p. 62, illustrated in color; p. 198

Lauren Elkin, “The Shape-shifter,” Tate Etc., no. 44, Winter 2019, pp. 3 and 5

Catriona McAra, “Glowing Like Phosphorus: Dorothea Tanning and the Sedona Western,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 10, no. 1, 2019, fig. 6, p. 96, illustrated in color; p. 97

Exh. Cat., Brühl, Max Ernst Museum, Max Ernst–D-paintings–Zeitreise der Liebe, 2019, pp. 81-83 and 134

Rochelle Roberts, “Postcards in Isolation 28: Somaya Critchlow and Dorothea Tanning’s Interior with Sudden Joy, 1951,” illustrated in color, https://lucywritersplatform.com/2020/10/15/postcards-in-isolation-28-somaya-critchlow-and-dorothea-tannings-interior-with-sudden-joy-1951/ (accessed on 1 December 2025)

Victoria Carruthers, Dorothea Tanning: Transformations, London, 2020, fig. 70, p. 88; p. 91, illustrated in color; p. 92

Ara H. Merjian, “A Surrealist ‘Little Sister’? Dorothea Tanning’s (Femme) Fatala (1947), Metaphysical Painting, and the Roman Policier,” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, vol. 37, no. 2, 2021, pp. 182-83

“Open Portfolio: Dorothea Tanning,” Sedona Monthly, May 2021, pp. 40 and 43

Amy Lyford, Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning, London, 2023, pp. 97, 99, 102, 109 (in reproduction of Exh. Cat., Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Dorothea Tanning, 1953), pp. 110, 115-18, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130, 214 and 216; p. 213, illustrated (in storyboard for film Unheard-of News); p. 100, illustrated in color

Willard Spiegelman, “‘Exquisite Dreams’ Review: Dorothea Tanning’s Surreal Vision,” The Wall Street Journal, 16 March 2024, p. C10

At the time Interior with Sudden Joy was created, Dorothea Tanning lived with husband Max Ernst in Sedona, Arizona. In this arid “landscape of wild fantasy,” as she described, Tanning’s studio became a refuge from the fierce desert heat and light of the exterior world (Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 96). The evocative and otherworldly paintings like Interior with Sudden Joy from the early 1950s witness the artist reaching the height of her expressive powers.

Often defined within the context of the Surrealist zeitgeist, Tanning in fact came to the movement in 1936 upon seeing Alfred Barr’s watershed exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The legendary exhibition brought works from as early as the fifteenth century into dialogue with the radical works of Dada and Surrealist artists working in the 1920s and 30s, and in it Tanning found true spiritual resonance with an artistic community. As Tanning later explained, the show was “the real explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels. Here is the infinitely faceted world I must have been waiting for. Here is the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY” (ibid., p. 49). That possibility unfurled in her practice not as mere imitation but as radical autonomy—her work engaging, absorbing and ultimately transcending the movement’s dogma.

In just a few years’ time, Tanning had become a part of the Surrealist milieu, represented by the gallerist Julien Levy and joining a coterie of European writers and painters who’d relocated to New York during the war. In 1942, she’d begun an impassioned relationship with Max Ernst and by 1946 the pair had decamped to Sedona. There, Tanning would create some of the most exceptional paintings of her career—including Interior with Sudden Joy, which she described in her memoir.

“A white and dark picture would muffle the red world outside. Big bare rooms with the white frozen figures, like Sodom and Gomorrah. There is opalescent light and velvet dark. Isn’t that the artist’s best joy, to control light? To rival the sun and moon, to turn their logic upside down with brushes and paint and monstrous ego? I am here. Arthur Rimbaud, mad poet, is here too, on the blackboard in my canvas. What you see there are notes from his secret notebook. Private, impudent signs. The door is not a door on the wild red garden, just on a little something personal, like the door of a house looking in.”

- Dorothea Tanning

Indeed, Interior with Sudden Joy is defined largely by the dichotomy of light and dark, proof of its Caravaggian power. On the right the eye is drawn to the two young women standing arm-in-arm and in various stages of undress. Tanning evokes an unsettling tension with these figures, who convey the nonchalance of adolescence yet assert a certain provocative awareness which only comes with time and experience. One, dress unbuttoned and leaning toward her companion, reaches down in a languid manner to pet a large dog, likely modeled after the artist’s own beloved Lhasa Apso, Katchina (who appears in a number of her paintings from this time). The young woman at left, perhaps a sister, friend, or alter ego of the other, stands transfixed, a focus-less gaze emanating from her heavily made-up face; her lit cigarette has fallen to the wooden floor, dangerously unnoticed. The juxtaposition of these two figures, each with their undergarments and heels and alternating looks of curiosity and resignation, only heightens the sense of unease and ambiguity within the scene.

In a separate narrative to the left, a naked young man with dark skin embraces a twisting, monumental white form. At once architectural and corporeal, its contorted, sheet-like limbs encircling him like a protective force. The entwined figures—one in a seeming state of transformation—may evoke Bernini’s sculpture Apollo and Daphne. Yet here the myth is transposed into an otherworldly register, reimagined as one of gentle shelter rather than unrequited love and pursuit. In Tanning’s telling, the nymph has already transmuted, not into a tree but to an abstract, sculptural form, foreshadowing the artist’s own transition in her approach to painting that would become increasingly abstract and her later soft sculptures fashioned from cloth.

At the painting’s left edge, an ominous figure materializes in the doorway—a symbolic threshold recurring throughout many of Tanning’s early works, including Birthday. This spectral messenger emerges from roiling clouds of smoke like a magician bearing a radiant bundle. Her face, illuminated by the light of her cargo, contrasts sharply in demeanor with the cloaked, shadowy figure seen in Tanning’s related painting The Guest Room (1950–52). The apparition’s meaning may be elusive, yet her penetrating gaze directs the viewer toward the open book resting on a regal-looking cushion, seemingly levitating as if imbued with divine power.

The book and a blackboard on the back wall suggest a classroom, though its lessons are enigmatic. Chalk notations punctuate the blackboard behind the central figures—an overt homage, as Tanning herself affirmed, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud–a favorite among the Surrealists. Among the cryptic inscriptions, the word Bruxelles emerges—both the title of one of Rimbaud’s elliptical poems and the city in which his tumultuous affair with Paul Verlaine reached its violent climax. That poem, with its fractured meter, stray ellipses, and vivid yet disjointed evocations of the Boulevard du Régent, conjures a surreal cartography of the city, not unlike the psychological terrain Tanning renders here. Elsewhere, the word 

Honte floats into view, likely a nod to another of Rimbaud’s poems, in which shame becomes the fulcrum for a spiral of imagined vengeance and juvenile fury. As in the painting, these references do not operate as fixed symbols, but as atmospheric cues—emotive traces from a shared interior world of reverie and tension.

A few years later, Interior with Sudden Joy would resurface in Tanning’s own writings. Her short poem “Interiors with...” was featured on the invitation to her 1953 solo exhibition at Alexander Iolas, in which Interior with Sudden Joy was first exhibited and samples the range of possibilities found in her interior spaces. The design of the invitation reiterates the wide wooden floor boards and perspective of the present work.

The painting, like its title, traffics in allusions and contradictions that invite multiple readings. There may be little visible “joy” in this composition—only its afterimage, the flicker of something once felt or hoped for. Tanning understood that emotion, like space, could be distorted, re-dimensioned, and made uncanny on the canvas. Ultimately, what she offers here is more than a scene to be decoded, but a mood to be entered. It is a room turned inside out, a theater of the self in which the artist and viewer can be both voyeur and inhabitant. As she wrote, for the artist the “best joy” is in making the painting.

In Interior with Sudden Joy, Tanning achieves what few artists of her generation dared: she stages the drama of the mind by combining modes of realism and abstraction. and poses characters as presences, real and unreal, inhabiting a plane where dream and memory intersect. Held in the same collection for more than forty years, the present work is one of the finest examples of Tanning’s work ever to come to auction.

The present work was acquired by renowned collector and artist, William N. Copley during the formative years of his engagement with the Surrealist movement in the 1950s. Interior with Sudden Joy, was subsequently acquired by Ira Genstein, another prominent Surrealist collector, before it entered the present collection by the 1970s. Its presence within these illustrious collections, especially that of William N .Copley, situates this painting within one of the most significant private collections of Dada and Surrealist art assembled in postwar America.