Dorothea Margaret Tanning (25 August 1910 – 31 January 2012) was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Her early work was influenced by Surrealism. Biography 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. After graduating from Galesburg Public High School in 1926, Tanning worked in the Galesburg Public Library (1927) and attended Knox College (1928–30). After two years of college she quit to pursue an artistic career, moving first to Chicago in 1930 and then to New York in 1935, where she supported herself as a commercial artist while working on her own painting. 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. In 1941, impressed by her creativity and talent in illustrating fashion advertisements, the art director at Macy’s department store introduced her to the gallery owner Julien Levy, who immediately offered to show her work. (Tanning would also become good friends with Levy and his wife, the painter Muriel Streeter, as seen in letters they exchanged in the 1940s.) Levy gave Tanning two solo exhibitions (in 1944 and 1948), and also introduced her to the circle of émigré Surrealists whose work he was showing in his New York gallery, including the German painter Max Ernst. Tanning first met Ernst at a party in 1942. Later he dropped by her studio to consider her work for inclusion in the 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York., which was owned by Peggy Guggenheim, Ernst's wife at the time. As Tanning recounts in her memoirs, he was enchanted by her iconic self-portrait Birthday (1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art). The two played chess, fell in love, and embarked on a life together that took them to Sedona in Arizona, and later to France. They lived in New York for several years before moving to Sedona, where they built a house and hosted visits from many friends crossing the country, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Balanchine, and Dylan Thomas. Tanning and Ernst were married in 1946 in a