In her memoir, Birthday, Tanning recalls how Mozart was a favourite topic of conversation at that time, and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is titled after one of one of his most well-known serenades ( Birthday, p.85). It was their first trip to this area in which they would later live for several years. While they don’t always have giant sunflowers (most aggressive of flowers) to contend with, there are always stairways, hallways, even very private theatres where the suffocations and the finalities are being played out, the blood red carpet or cruel yellows, the attacker, the delighted victim.’ (Letter to the author, 1999)Įine Kleine Nachtmusik was made while Tanning was staying with her companion, the artist Max Ernst, in Sedona, Arizona. Everyone believes he/she is his/her drama. Tanning has said: ‘It’s about confrontation.
The tattered state of the clothes worn by both the doll and the girl suggests that there has been some sort of struggle or encounter with powerful forces, and the girl’s long hair streams upwards as if blasted by an immensely powerful gust of wind. Her status as a toy is only revealed by her hairline and the regularly moulded contours of her torso. The doll is remarkably life-like and wears similar clothing to the girl standing nearby. Two fallen petals lie further down the stairs and a third is held by a doll propped against one of the doorways. A giant sunflower and pieces of its torn stem lie on the landing. It shows what appears to be a hotel corridor with numbered doors, the farthest of which is open just enough to offer a glimpse of incandescent light. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is one of the best known of Dorothea Tanning’s early paintings.
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