Fanny Brennan


Fanny Myers Brennan was a French-American surrealist painter. She was born in Paris, and educated in the United States and Europe, enrolling in art school in France in 1938. When war began, she went to New York. In 1941 the Wakefield Bookshop gallery run by Betty Parsons included her in two shows. She also worked for Harpers Bazaar and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1944, the Office of War Information hired her to work in Europe. For almost twenty years after the births of her children she ceased painting, not beginning again until 1970. Starting in 1973, she had three solo exhibitions with Betty Parsons, and then some with Coe Kerr Gallery. A book of her work, titled Skyshades: Sixty Small paintings, was published in 1990 with an introduction by Calvin Tomkins.
Her paintings were typically in miniature format and frequently combined domestic objects such as buttons with landscapes. The art critic Celia McGee said of her paintings that "Brennan's magic‐realist canvases—in which landscapes are literally put in a nutshell, a feather duster is taken to Mount Fuji, a spool of ribbon unwinds into a road, and scale and gravity are turned on their heads—are never larger than six square inches."
Her portrait was drawn by Alberto Giacometti. She died in July 22, 2001 in New York City.