Between Lives: An Artist and Her World

Dorothea Tanning, one of the twentieth-century's most original and provocative painters, delivers a vivid account of a fascinating life lived as an artist among artists. Tanning reveals not only her life story, but the irresistibly creative mind that propelled her to live it. From the small town of Galesburg, Illinois, to the art hubs of New York and Paris, Tanning traveled the world of Surrealism and went beyond it, with fellow explorers Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, Joan MirÓ, James Merrill, and Max Ernst, to whom she was married for over thirty years. Their life together forms an important and moving part of her unforgettable story; a story which, spanning almost a century, magically unfolds through Tanning's incandescent prose.

"Tanning's . . . beguiling memoir chronicles her small-town Midwestern girlhood and travels through the postwar art worlds of New York and Paris, where she collaborated with George Balanchine on ballet sets and spent decades reconfiguring female anatomy in delirious nudes." --Vogue

"A mix of acidic critique, clear-eyed remembrance, and funny, name-dropping anecdotes, this autobiography offers a glimpse of the creative process and reveals some of the sacrifices required of an ambitious, creative woman wed to a more famous man." --Village Voice

"In buoyant and electric prose, laced with wit and leavened with ungrudging generosity, Dorothea Tanning has given us in this memoir a brilliant account of the fizz and panache of a truly remarkable life: Stravinsky provides her wedding champagne; Andre Malraux upstages Orson Welles; J. Robert Oppenheimer turns up at Les Deux Magots; and the gentle and enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning's husband, is the presiding spirit." --Anthony Hecht