Sedona was once a Surrealism outpost in the desert, where resident artists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning made work at their home, Capricorn Hill.
Like cut-out bits waiting to be collaged, or a game of exquisite corpse, random cues kept popping up, nudging my unconscious. At first, I just shrugged.
When my grandma Dacotah moved to Sedona, Arizona, in 1962, the Indigenous Yavapai had long been forcefully removed through campaigns instigated by the U.S. government. White settlers assumed ownership of their gardens, and Sedona became a cowtown known for its scenery, orchards, and cowboy artists amid spectacular red-rock behemoths. In fact, Joe Beeler, Charlie Dye, John Hampton, and George Phippen got together one day at Oak Creek Tavern and decided to form, with Fred Harman, the Cowboy Artists of America, which still exists. Whenever we’d visit Gram, cowboy art is what my dad, a cattle man, would seek out.
One day, however, Gram surprised me with a water-stained blue book in two parts titled At Eye Level and Paramyths by Max Ernst. Published in 1949, the book included poems for Ernst (a prolific German artist and pioneer of the Dada and Surrealist art movements in Europe) by Surrealist poets including Paul Éluard; a story by American artist Dorothea Tanning (Ernst’s wife); and pages of drawings and text both mythological and bizarre. “They lived here for a while,” was all Gram said, knowing I studied art. Now, this was interesting.
I read up on Surrealism, a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that developed in Europe after World War I. Its artists attempted to unleash the creative potential of the unconscious mind and dreams through games like cadavre exquis (as Tanning called it), and such techniques as automatic drawing, painting, and writing, and torn-paper collages and poems. The results were intended to reflect randomness, illogical scenes, and uncanny juxtapositions.
Born and raised in Illinois, Tanning was a polymath who, in addition to painting, drawing, and writing, designed ballet costumes and sewed bizarre soft sculptures. I read Tanning’s 2004 novella Chasm: A Weekend, published when the artist was ninety-four, a gothic tale of a party gone awry at a mysterious house in the desert amid formidable canyons, as well as her memoirs and poetry. I hiked a trail near Gram’s house that, at its terminus, featured a massive old cistern of red rock and cement, and wondered: who built that?
In Desert Retreats: Sedona Style, I found a chapter on the home Ernst and Tanning built off Brewer Road in Sedona, which Tanning named Capricorn Hill. One afternoon, book in hand, having penciled in the names of mountains in the photos, I tried to locate the property—unsuccessfully. But soon after, I met Mark Rownd: musician, composer, and artist; art collector and art historian; and advocate and educator of all things Ernst, Tanning, Surrealism, and Capricorn Hill.
Rownd, a graduate of Rice University in Houston, Texas, says his interest in Surrealism began at the Menil Collection, which houses one of the largest collections of Ernst’s work. After Rownd and his wife Darcy moved to Sedona, he realized only a handful of residents knew Tanning and Ernst had lived in town, much less what they represented in the art world. Rownd decided “I needed to do something about Max and Dorothea,” and that “I guess I’m the guy to teach Sedona this part of its history,” he recalls.
In 2014, Rownd rented a space at the Sedona Arts Center and exhibited the Surrealist prints and lithographs he’d collected—some by Ernst and Tanning—thereby launching an effort to recognize Sedona as a center for Surrealist study and scholarship. In 2020, with Rownd’s help, SAC mounted the 31 Women Artists Exhibition, a response to Peggy Guggenheim’s Exhibition by 31 Women at her gallery Art of This Century in New York City, which Ernst curated in 1943. Ernst included newcomer Tanning’s self-portrait Birthday (1942) in the exhibition. (After meeting Tanning and selecting her painting, Ernst, at the time married to Guggenheim, promptly left the gallerist and moved in with Tanning.)
SAC’s exhibition included works from Rownd’s collection by six of the artists featured in Guggenheim’s show: Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Hedda Sterne, Sonja Sekula, Hazel Guggenheim, and Tanning. Catriona McAra, curator and Tanning scholar, selected work by twenty-five other contemporary women artists for the show. At some point, a thesis was floated that Ernst and Tanning’s time in Sedona exerted a credible if not profound influence on the Surrealist art movement in Europe and the Americas. Should Sedona be globally recognized not only for its stunning red-rock landscape and New Age energy vortexes, but as a nerve center in the development of the Surrealist art movement, as well?
The Backstory
In 1941, Ernst, his son Jimmy, and Guggenheim flew to Los Angeles to open a West Coast gallery. They decided against it, rented a car, and were driving back to New York through Sedona when they stopped for a rattlesnake in the road. Ernst got out of the car and, as Jimmy Ernst recalls in his memoir A Not So Still Life, his father was gobsmacked: “Before him stretched his own imagination: the landscapes and images he had been painting for years before ever visiting the United States.” Says Rownd, “In today’s parlance, Max probably thought he’d manifested this landscape.”
During the same trip, the group also stopped at an Indian trading post north of Sedona, near the Hopi mesas, where Ernst purchased his first collection of katsinam, entranced by these representations of Hopi spirit beings. There was precedence. All of the Surrealists had studied Carl Jung, Rownd says, and Jung had met with a Hopi elder “who profoundly affected Jung’s mindset about dreaming and the psychoanalytic theory he was developing.” The Surrealists also read Hopi Chief Don C. Talayesva’s 1942 book Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian. French writer (and friend of Ernst) André Breton conducted his own study of the Hopi on a trip to the mesas. “The Surrealists,” Rownd adds, “had a synergy with the Hopi who, like the Surrealists, didn’t differentiate between dream life and waking life.”
Tanning and Ernst first visited Sedona together in the summer of 1943, knowing the dry desert air would improve Tanning’s health after a bout of encephalitis. In his biographical notes, Ernst mentioned only sixteen people lived in Sedona at the time. In 1946, the couple returned to the “landscape of wild fantasy,” as Tanning wrote in her memoir Between Lives, staying at Shekayah Guest Ranch on Oak Creek (now the resort Los Abrigados and shopping area Tlaquepaque). Artist Lillian Smith, who created the covers for Zane Grey’s Westerns (the most famous being Call of the Canyon, set in Oak Creek Canyon), owned the ranch, and took Tanning and Ernst to her trading post near the Hopi mesas.
The couple soon bought three and a half acres off Brewer Road for $1000 and began building a house. “[O]f wood, for there is no water,” Tanning wrote in her memoir Birthday. They bought supplies from the Sedona Lumber Company and Hart Store, where cowhands asked Ernst, “You here to paint scenes?” In addition to Smith’s social group, the couple hobnobbed with local sculptors Mary and Bob Kittredge and helped Jack (then-president of TWA) and Helen Frye build their House of Apache Fire, which is now part of Red Rock State Park. After a year of hauling water to their site, Ernst constructed a cistern (the one I’d seen on my hikes) behind his studio and began piping water into the house. “It was a great day,” Tanning wrote in Between Lives.
Moreover, she added, because “the next day Max could begin a monument to our Capricorn Hill,” as Tanning had named the property, “a king and queen in cement and scrap iron, regal guardians for our house.” Ernst also added cement structures and sculptural elements to the ever-expanding home. And the two artists painted. Ernst embraced the fiery landscape in works such as Arizona Rouge (1955), Inspired Hill (1950), and Two Cardinal Points (1950). Tanning, however, recoiled from the intensity of the red rocks outside her studio window.
As she explained in a 1990 interview for the Archives of American Art, “It’s beautiful to see, but if you’re painting, you just can’t paint that much red.” Instead, Tanning plumbed her own inner life and dream world creating such masterworks as the dark-toned Interior with Sudden Joy (1951); Max in a Blue Boat (1947), featuring the door of their house and a dusky desert-like background; and Eine kleine Nachtmusik (1943) and Palaestra (1949) with her signature doors, sunflowers, and irrepressible young women.
Tanning also undertook “to paint the unpaintable,” as she wrote in the exhibition brochure for Dorothea Tanning: Birthday and Beyond, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2000. In Self-Portrait (1944), she rendered a Sedona-like landscape in blues and greens—with one red mountain to the side—as Tanning, wearing a swimsuit with her back to the viewer, her hair up in Hopi butterfly whorls, standing on a katsina-like pedestal, gazes out at a great flood, perhaps a reference to the Yavapai people’s origin story.
“Sedona is the other way,” Tanning wrote in Birthday. “And these are incomparable years.” The artists were prolific. They also entertained many visitors, including Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage, Pavel Tchelitchew and Charles Henri Ford, George Balanchine (for whom Tanning designed ballet costumes) and Tanny Le Clercq, Caresse Crosby, Sonja Sekula, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Igor Stravinsky. One of their regular excursions was to the Hopi mesas where they often witnessed men in elaborate katsina regalia perform spirit dances.
Every year, the couple drove a load of paintings back to New York City for exhibitions at Julien Levy’s gallery, an important venue for the Surrealists, but sold little. Nonetheless, their work was seen by artists and reviewed by art critics, “so people were aware of what Dorothea and Max were doing in Sedona,” says Rownd. The couple also traveled between France and Sedona for several years, a commute that became unsustainable. In 1959, they sold the house to Jimmy and moved to France, visiting from time to time. In 1965, Jimmy sold the house.
The Surrealism Enterprise
In 2022, Rownd and a partner purchased Capricorn Hill. The house has undergone many changes, and next door, new construction outside of Tanning’s studio window now obscures views of the red rocks that existed for eighty years, Rownd says. The property includes a guest house and a garage built by previous owners, which the partners run as Airbnbs. Ernst’s monumental sculpture Capricorn (1947) is gone, but original fragments and bronze iterations are in museums around the world. And Rownd frequently uncovers pieces, including a portion he believes are the king’s toes and a slab embedded with Ernst’s footprint—perhaps the artist’s nod to Hopi kukveni, a metaphor for their frequent migrations.
These bits, along with Rownd’s art collection, photographs of Ernst, Tanning, and friends, documents related to the house, and books on Surrealism are part of the nonprofit museum Capricorn Hill has become. Rownd laments how the City of Sedona and Chamber of Commerce “have missed an opportunity here” to capitalize on the town’s Surrealist art history, unlike, say, Santa Fe, which “built its brand on Georgia O’Keeffe.”
Still, says Nancy Lattanzi, a specialist in Sedona’s department of art and culture, the City has collaborated with Rownd on exhibitions and mounted shows of Amy Ernst’s work—Max Ernst’s granddaughter.
“There are many art organizations in Sedona that have also celebrated the works of Ernst and Tanning for their important contributions in Surrealism and the legacy they have left with Sedona,” Lattanzi adds. The Sedona Heritage Museum focuses on the area’s white pioneers, but in 2015 held a workshop on Tanning and Ernst’s time in Sedona in conjunction with the nascent Fine Art Museum of Sedona; the Sedona History Walk includes a plaque on Tanning and Ernst; and the City’s tourism website includes a page on the artists.
Meanwhile, Capricorn Hill “has become a rallying point for art historians,” says Rownd. Some of their research, along with theses on the impact of Tanning and Ernst’s time in Sedona on the Surrealist art movement, was presented during the colloquium “Surrealist Sedona,” part of “Surrealisms 2023” in Houston, the fifth annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism.
In her paper “From Metaphor to Reality: Surrealist Communities in the Desert,” Efthymia Rentzou, professor of French literature at Princeton University, argued that the couple created a Western outpost for Surrealism in Sedona, “a community constituted in the desert—a community of artists who came through the Tanning-Ernst household, but also community between European and Native American culture articulated through their work.” Kate Conley, Chancellor Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures, Emerita, at William and Mary, and presenter at the conference, also pointed out that the Hopi “drew artists from all over who were curious about the culture,” particularly after Ernst’s katsina collection was published in art magazines, and Ernst and Tanning took guests to the mesas.
In a phone conversation, Conley also conjectured that such excursions left indelible marks on the psyches of Ernst and Tanning’s Surrealist compatriots, including Miller and Penrose who turned their home in Sussex, England, Farleys House and Gallery, into the “Home of the Surrealists.”
Moreover, McAra wrote in an email, “The unique properties of the Red Rock landscape continued to recur throughout their oeuvres which is a sign of what it meant to their innate sense of Surrealism and the uncanny.” The entire Houston panel, added McAra, “felt strongly [Tanning and Ernst’s time in Sedona] was a vital chapter of Surrealist history.”
Rownd continues moving forward with what he calls “the Surrealism enterprise here in Sedona” on Capricorn Hill. While representational art, including cowboy and Western painting and sculpture and plein air and landscape painting, dominates the art scene in Sedona today, the Surrealist impulse continues to underpin the creative community that Tanning and Ernst, the Kittredges, Fryes, and even the early cowboy artists generated. “A critical mass,” McAra wrote in her email, “that helped Sedona become the vibrant art scene it is today. I call it a Surrealist archaeology.”
Correction 3/19/2024: The print version of this article in Vol 9 of Southwest Contemporary states that Dorothea Tanning was born and raised in Wisconsin, when in fact she was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois. This web article has been edited to reflect that fact.
