Fanny Brennan

Fanny Brennan
Born	1921 (1921) Paris, France
Died	2001 (aged 79–80) New York City
Nationality	French-American
Known for	Painting
Movement	Surrealism

Fanny Myers Brennan (1921–July 22, 2001) was a French-American surrealist artist and painter.^[1][2]

Brennan was born in Paris, educated in the United States and Europe and enrolled in an art school in France in 1938.^[1] When World War II began, Brennan went to New York.^[1] In 1941 the Wakefield Bookshop gallery run by Betty Parsons included her in two shows.^[1] She also worked for Harper's Bazaar and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[3][1] In 1944, the Office of War Information hired her to work in Europe.^[1] For almost twenty years after the birth of her children Brennan ceased painting, not beginning again until 1970.^[1] Starting in 1973, she had three solo exhibitions with Parsons, and then some with Coe Kerr Gallery.^[1] A book of her work, titled Skyshades: Sixty Small paintings, was published in 1990 with an introduction by Calvin Tomkins.^[1][4]

Brennan's paintings are typically in miniature format and frequently combine domestic objects such as buttons with landscapes.^[5] 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."^[6]

Her portrait was drawn by Alberto Giacometti.^[3] She died on July 22, 2001, in New York City.^[7]

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