Nue couchée
- Artist: Dorothea Tanning
- Date: 1969–70
- Medium: Cotton textile, cardboard, 7 table tennis balls, wool and thread
- Dimensions: object: 385 x 1089 x 535 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “Nue couchée” by Dorothea Tanning. It’s a soft sculpture from 1969‑70, built from cotton fabric, cardboard, wool, and even seven table‑tennis balls that pop out like vertebrae. The piece looks like a reclining nude, but it’s more a living object than a representation – Tanning called them “living materials becoming living sculptures, their life span something like ours.”
The fabric curves and folds into a contorted, almost playful form, while the balls give a spine‑like rhythm. It sits at the boundary between object and being, animate and inanimate. Tanning didn’t want it read through a gendered lens; instead she saw it as part of an imaginative, almost fairy‑tale world.
So you’re looking at a piece that feels both familiar and oddly alien, a soft, tactile dream that invites you to step into the artist’s fantasy rather than a conventional depiction of the female form.
See it in person
Nue couchée is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
