The Truth About Comets

Dorothea Margaret Tanning (25 August 1910 – 31 January 2012) was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Her early work was influenced by European Surrealism.

Dorothea Tanning was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois. She was the second of three daughters to Andrew Peter Tanning (born Andreas Peter Georg Thaning; 1875–1943) and Amanda Marie Hansen (1879–1967), who named her for her maternal grandmother. Both of her parents were immigrants from Sweden. After graduating from Galesburg Public High School in 1926, Tanning worked in the Galesburg Public Library (1927) and attended Knox College in Illinois from 1928.

After two years, she quit to pursue an artistic career, moving first to Chicago in 1930 and then to New York City in 1935, where she supported herself as a commercial artist while working on her own paintings. Tanning was married briefly to the writer Homer Shannon in 1941, after an eight-year relationship.

In New York, Tanning discovered Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art's seminal 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.