The 7 Spectral Perils of Dorothea Tanning

I like a picture series, and this is one I hadn’t encountered before. Dorothea Tanning’s Les 7 périls spectraux (1950) is a portfolio of seven lithograph prints with accompanying text, “Pourquoi Rester Muets?”, by André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Of the series, the artist had this to say:

My first lithograph adventure has become a book. An album with seven perils in it. Because to the seven deadly sins I preferred the seven spectral perils, life being more perilous than sinful.

What we don’t have—or I’ve been unable to find—is a list of perils to go with their respective prints. I’d guess, therefore, that with the perils being replacements for sins there’s a correspondence with the traditional prescriptive list, although this still leaves us to guess which is which. The print that shows a sunflower framed by a knife and fork may be allied to gluttony or it may refer to something entirely different, sunflowers being a recurrent, often enigmatic, feature of Tanning’s paintings.

First Peril.

There’s a further correspondence with Une Semaine de Bonté, the collage novel created by Tanning’s husband, Max Ernst, in the 1930s. Ernst’s “Week of Kindness” comprises seven days, each of which is assigned a “capital element”, only in Ernst’s scheme we have a definite list of elements: mud, water, fire, blood, blackness, sight, and “unknown”. Since Tanning’s perils may also refer to a private mythology we’ll have to assign them to “unknown” as well, unless further information comes to light.