Between lives : an artist and her world / Dorothea Tanning.

Includes index.

In this memoir, an expansion of Birthday, her 1987 collection of reminiscences, Tanning recounts her life and work. A noted painter and sculptor, Tanning moved in a circle that included some of the 20th century's greatest creative presences. From the worlds of dance, music, and literature, Tanning remembers episodes with Virgil Thomson, George Balanchine, Dylan Thomas, and Truman Capote. Her own artistic milieu included Giacometti, Joseph Cornell, Joan Miro, and her husband, the surrealist Max Ernst. Never merely gossipy or needlessly name-dropping, Tanning's memoir parades those she met and knew through New York, to New Mexico, to Paris, and back again, after Ernst's death, to New York. In her writing, Tanning achieves, at moments and sometimes for pages at a time, a prose style that is nearly, but not quite, lucid. Unfortunately, her maddeningly "poetic" account provides us with an obstructed view into the world of modern art.