LA CIENEGA AREA

As a young woman who’d migrated from her home in Illinois to New York City, Dorothea Tanning was mightily impressed by the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition of 1936, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.” “It was like lightning striking,” recalls the artist, now 76. Lightning obviously struck Tanning a second time in 1942 when she met modernist master Max Ernst, whom she subsequently married.

Lapis Press recently published her sharply observed memoir of her husband (who died in 1976), and the book--titled “Birthday”--will probably ensure that Tanning’s place in history will be next to her husband. She is, however, an accomplished Surrealist painter in her own right; a mini-retrospective of her work of the last 25 years offers ample proof of that.

Tanning’s aesthetic is intensely feminine, yet the work is refreshingly free of the browbeaten bitterness and sugar-sweet coquetry that afflicts much feminist work. Favoring a sensual palette, she paints with a loose, impressionistic touch and imbues her Rubenesque ladies with glowing radiance.

In “Mean Frequency of Auroras,” we see a celestial cluster of women who appear to be lounging on a crescent moon. It’s a rather cosmic and gaseous picture, and her work does occasionally go a bit soggy with mysticism; at the same time, there’s undeniable strength and control about Tanning’s pictures. Reserved and inscrutable, they’re a bit tough, leavened as they are with the wicked humor you’d expect of one who’d spent her life with a Dada master.

A pair of reclining maidens in a picture called “Sequestarians” look alarmingly vampiric, while a work titled “Faith, Surrounded by Hope, Charity and Other Monsters” lets us know that Tanning is no wide-eyed Polyanna. Having fallen prey to the tricks of life and survived, she chooses to allow herself to be slightly enchanted by them nonetheless. (Feingarten Gallery, 8380 Melrose Ave., to June 30.)