Dorothea Tanning's Cousins                                        synthetic fur over cotton stuffing and                                         wood base, 60 x 25 x 21 in. 1970 She came to him in dreams, as he to her in waking. And that was how they would meet, ever wrong from the start, however right                                 for the act, melting together yet somehow sadly apart, orifices certainly unmatched to protuberances, although affording                                 opportunity, it appeared, in the oddest places; no completion but the striving, the struggle, the melancholy abandonment of his                                 strain, her stratagem: eventually, then, it came down to this immense tedium, another name for all our tenderness, solicitude.                                 Ready and waiting, but the hope forlorn, the motive foregone: she tyrannically submissive to his compliant despotism, he yielding                                 over and underneath to her surrender-her victory his peculiar triumph. As if they neither expected nor could resist, when it came,                                 renunciation! Their embrace, or-better-their lenient enacting of what Milton himself calls intimate impulse, has reached that                                 pitch of expertise when the thing seen becomes the unseen thing. With enemies like themselves (all cousins "descended from a common ancestor"),                                 what lovers need friends? --Richard Howard in tribute to Dominique de Menil, who purchased Cousins for the Menil Collection, in which it is the only sculpture by a woman.