Curator, Ann Temkin: We're looking at a painting made by Dorothea Tanning in 1948, entitled On Time Off Time.
Tanning grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, and moved to New York City in 1935. She immediately became engaged by the Surrealist movement.
She painted this work in Sedona, Arizona, where she had moved from New York City in 1946 with her new husband, the German Surrealist, Max Ernst. We see an architectural structure reminiscent of the house that she and Max Ernst built for themselves to live in. The smoke, the flames, the sunflower; all of these recur in Tanning's paintings. The only human life that we see is this blindfolded woman against the blue sky to the right, who seems to be blowing bubbles.
This picture has many purely imaginary elements full of the potential for hinting at dreams, hinting at fantasies without being able to piece together the various elements in the painting to come up with a narrative. For the Surrealists, it was a matter of using very sharp images but open, ambiguous, unclear meaning.