Surrealism has often been labeled as a misogynistic movement that sought to provide man with an avenue into a higher reality at the expense of the humanity of women. By perceiving the opposite sex as their muses, Surrealist men rendered women as mysterious sources of the marvelous, the name given to the higher realm, which they desired to attain. I propose that Surrealist women were empowered by the fact that ‘woman’, as an abstract concept, and femininity were synonymous with the marvelous. This entailed that Surrealist women had the advantage of being “sources of revelation, as provokers of wonder, dreams, and freedom,” whose intellectual agency allowed them to delve into their own femininity in order to attain the higher reality that Surrealism was devoted to unlocking. In contrast from Surrealist men who relied on the image of woman to lead them to this superior realm, Surrealist women were able to look within themselves in order to comprehend the marvelous. Conversely, Surrealist women often reversed the idea of the muse, by exploring their feminine unconscious through the objectification of men.

In 1955, American artist Dorothea Tanning abandoned her figurative Surrealist renderings of dream-like scenarios in favor of a complexly abstract and fragmented style of painting. With few exceptions, the ways in which Tanning’s later works function independently of her earlier paintings tends to be downplayed in the scholarship on her oeuvre. Equally sparse is the scholarship on Tanning’s dog imagery, which pervades her oeuvre but becomes most apparent in her later phase. This thesis seeks to shift attention toward Tanning’s later abstract paintings; it also seeks to fill the gap in scholarship on Tanning’s dogs. Specifically, through the study of five Tanning paintings from the late 1950s and 1960s, with the theoretical aid of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the becoming-animal, this thesis will investigate how Tanning’s post-1955 paintings create and promote new ways for viewers to think about the relations between humans and animals in the human-dominated modern world.