DOGS OF CYTHERA
DOROTHEA TANNING, 1963
Dogs should make a painting feel safe. That's the deal with dogs. Wet nose, dumb happy face, everybody relaxes. So start there, because this painting is called Dogs of Cythera, there are dogs in it, sort of, and it is not relaxing. The bodies hit first. A gray-green fog full of flesh, tumbling over itself, legs where legs shouldn't be. Hunt for a dog and you find one dark muzzle buried in the pile. The rest won't commit. Part pet, part person, all momentum. The island in the title is Aphrodite's. Love island. In 1717, Watteau painted it as silk and music, elegant lovers floating off to paradise. Then Baudelaire got there. In his version, the traveler reaches the island and finds a hanged man rotting on a gallows. Birds are already working on him. Underneath, something circles. Baudelaire won't call them dogs. His word is quadrupeds. Muzzles up, waiting their turn. Same island. The brochure got a rewrite. Tanning had her own messy trip to the island. New York, 1942. Max Ernst comes by her studio. He's picking work for a group show at his wife's gallery. His wife is Peggy Guggenheim. He sees Tanning's self-portrait. Names it Birthday. Then he spots the chessboard. They play. Within a week, he moves in. The show opens with thirty-one women. Guggenheim reportedly says she should have stopped at thirty. They married. He never went home. And somewhere in those years, her painting broke open. "Around 1955," she wrote, "my canvases literally splintered." The crisp haunted hallways were gone. Bodies loosened. Paint loosened. Everything blurred and surged. Her version has no silk. No visible gallows. Just the running. Toward love? Away from it? She never said. And it isn't that she couldn't paint a dog. She lived with a Lhasa Apso named Katchina, who shows up in other paintings huge, furry, unmistakably a dog. When Tanning wanted a dog, you got a dog. These, she wanted running.