When American artist Dorothea Tanning painted “Birthday” in 1942, she announced her arrival – an artistic birth, as she later described it – into the surrealist movement.
Surrealism is an avant-garde art and literary movement that began in Paris in the 1920s and sought to unleash the unconscious mind. Women artists within the movement often drew on its dreamlike language to counter male surrealists’ idealized and objectifying portrayals of women, reclaiming their own agency and identity.
