Dorothea Tanning was a self-taught artist from Galesburg Illinois born in 1910 that was heavily influenced by the surrealist works of her to be husband, Max Ernst. The couple later moved to Paris in 1949, until the death of Max Ernst in 1976 forced Tanning to relocate to New York where she passed away in 2012 at the age of 101. Tanning’s earliest works clearly emerged from the 1920’s Surrealist concept of the liberation of the human consciousness from the strict rationality of the order in modern society. Tanning eventually wielded her own style near the end of her 6-decade long career. Her early works of the 1940s were exacting depictions of dreamlike states, characterized by a meticulous attention to fine detail, combining surreal figures …show more content…
One of Tanning’s closest colleagues in Paris, Georges Visat served as the printmaker for each of these three engravings. Born in Foce Di Mela, France in 1910, Visat became an experienced intaglio engraver after working as an apprentice to a master printer in Paris, later buying the studio in 1937. For Tanning’s engravings, Visat used the process of sugar lift to transfer the value and shape of Tanning’s brushstrokes on the engraving plate. In order to achieve this effect, a sugar ink solution is painted onto an engraving plate, then using a bath of a soft ground, the sugar solution is covered in preparation for an aquatint to create the outline. After this, the sugar solution is dissolved and washed away allowing the final print to be created with aquatint. In this process, a copper engraving plate is dusted with granulated resin, which is melted forming a mist of resin droplets which are then exposed to an acid bath which erodes the engraving plate around these hardened resin nodules. This process ultimately develops an evenly pitted surface producing broad areas of tone resembling that of