Sunflower in the Hall: Dorothea Tanning

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, Dorothea Tanning 

It has been years since I’ve been to the Tate Modern, but I remember coming home afterward and trying to google a painting featuring little girls in a hallways with what seemed like a very dangerous and large sunflower. I couldn’t find anything about it.

Recently I happened across the image in a blog post about Dorothea Tanning, and all mysteries were revealed. Dorothea Tanning was speaking about her painting (my mystery image) when she said:

At night one imagines all sorts of happenings in the shadows of the darkness. A hotel bedroom is both intimate and unfamiliar, almost alienation, and this can conjure a feeling of menace and unknown forces at play. But these unknown forces are a projection of our own imaginations: our own private nightmares.
     —Dorothea Tanning in an interview with Victoria Carruthers, Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, 2010, p. 112.

Well, perhaps not all mysteries.

For the benefit of all future mes, I added “girls in hallway” and “sunflower” as tags to this post.