Dorothea Tanning's Insomnia paintings represent a major and pivotal period in the work of one of America's major surrealists. Tanning, who was born in 1910 in Galesburg, a town on the Illinois prairie, first came to fame in the 1940s as one of the painters in the gallery of Julien Levy, New York's preeminent dealer of surrealism. However, in the 1950s she felt a growing need to move beyond the prevailing idiom of surrealist representation. She describes what happened: "Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered... I broke the mirror, you might say." The resulting paintings are vibrant with faceted colors and shifting spaces that both conceal and reveal figures engaged in actions that can never be fixed or wholly known. The Insomnias—the group takes its name from a painting of the same title that Tanning made in 1957—are forays into the realm of conjured energies; they represent a forceful expansion of both form and content at a crucial historical moment. Charles Stuckey describes these "seemingly multidimensional mindspaces" as "among the most ambitious and sophisticated paintings to address the dilemmas of imagination and culture in a new atomic, space-race age." The writer, Charles Stuckey, is an art historian specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth century. He has been curator of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. He has written widely on impressionism, post-impressionism, surrealism, and postwar American art, and is currently teaching museum history and the history of the art market. Stuckey is a contributing editor at Art in America and is senior advisor to Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. The writer, Richard Howard, is a poet, critic, and translator. He has published eleven books of poetry and over 150 translations of modern French authors. Howard's poetry has been honored with several awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, and Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In 1996 he received a MacArthur fellowship. Howard has been poetry editor at the Western Humanities Review, the Paris Review, the New American Review, and the New Republic. Hardcover, 7 x 6 in. 80 pages, 14 color plates ISBN: 1-878607-95-2 $14.95 order from amazon.com