DOGS OF CYTHERA
DOROTHEA TANNING, 1963
I trust dogs more than I trust most people. That's not even a joke. If there's a dog in a painting, I relax. Dogs mean safety, honesty — like, okay, nothing terrible is happening here. That's my system. So I look at this and my brain goes: great. Dogs. Running. Open space. We're fine. This is Dogs of Cythera. Dorothea Tanning. 1963. And then the dogs keep running. And keep running. And I start wondering why I'm still tense. Because they're not playing. They're not stopping to smell anything. They're not looking back at anyone they love. They feel less like pets and more like momentum. And look closer. They're not even fully dogs. The faces are kind of pug-ish, sure, but the bodies are fleshy, tangled, almost human. At some point it stops feeling like a pack and starts feeling like one creature with too many legs. That's when my dog logic breaks. Now, Cythera matters. In myth, Cythera is the island of Aphrodite. Love island. Paradise. Watteau painted it in 1717 as this dreamy place of silk, lovers, music, departure, all the elegant European nonsense you could possibly want. Then Baudelaire gets his hands on it and ruins the brochure. In his poem Voyage to Cythera, the speaker arrives and finds a hanged man rotting on a tree. Same island. Very different tourism campaign. So by the time Tanning uses Cythera, the place is already unstable. Paradise with a trapdoor underneath it. And she doesn't give you lovers. She doesn't give you a corpse. She gives you dogs that don't quite behave like dogs. Tanning was fifty-three when she made this. For years she had been known for these precise, eerie Surrealist interiors — young girls, haunted rooms, doors that feel like they know too much. Then she starts moving away from that. The bodies loosen. The paint loosens. Everything starts to blur and surge. So these dogs aren't just running through space. They're running through a change in her painting. That's what makes the picture hard to settle. Part of you wants to call it freedom. Speed. Joy. Because again: dogs. But the painting keeps saying: are you sure? Maybe they're running toward something, or away from something, and the painting doesn't seem very interested in helping you tell the difference. And that's what stays with me. The thing I trusted to comfort me is still there. It just won't sit still.