Leonor Fini was an Argentine-Italian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women. She is considered one of the most important women artists of the twentieth century and also one of the most misunderstood. Frequently labelled a surrealist she was never a member of that group or movement.
Background
Leonor Fini (originally called Eleonora) was born on August 30, 1908 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Her Italian mother Malvina, married Herminio Fini, a wealthy businessman also of Italian background, and together they moved to Argentina. The two separated when Fini was just a baby and Malvina quickly moved back home to Trieste in Italy with her daughter. Leonor was raised entirely by her independent mother in Trieste, Italy, her mother's home city.
Fini experienced a free and bohemian lifestyle from an early age. The separation between the artist's parents was not simple; Herminio fought for the custody of Fini and once tried to kidnap her. As result, Fini spent some of her childhood years disguised as a boy, likely initiating a lifelong fascination for dressing up.
Education
During her youth, Fini had a profoundly rebellious spirit, and was expelled from multiple schools for a lack of ability to adhere to the "rules".
Fini did not have any formal artistic training and was completely self-taught. She learnt about art by drawing, reading books that she found in her uncle's library, and from countless visits to museums during her travels throughout Europe.
Career
By the age of seventeen, Fini was already exhibiting her portraits in Trieste, and frequenting the artistic and literary circles of the town.
In 1931, she moved briefly to Milan and then to Paris where she became acquainted with Carlo Carra and Giorgio de Chirico, both became profound influences on the aspiring young artist.
Fini quickly became an integral part of the Parisian art scene and social circles. During this time, she was also exhibiting her work in Parisian art galleries - one of her first exhibitions was at Christian Dior's gallery that was run by Dior before he became an acclaimed fashion designer.
Upon invitation by Julien Levy, the renowned American art dealer, Fini participated in her first major collective exhibition in 1936 in New York at Julian Levy’s Gallery, along with fellow surrealist European and American painters including Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, and Pavel Tchelitchew. Although her works were constantly featured alongside those of the Surrealists, she never became a formal member of the group, always preferring to remain an independent artist. In 1936, Fini moved from Italy to France and soon after met Carrington who had moved to Paris in 1937. The two women were like-minded in many ways and spent an intense summer in the French countryside together in the months before the announcement of World War II.
Throughout this time, Fini also worked as an accomplished portraitist, painting portraits of many celebrities and visitors to Paris, and especially of her friends including writer Jean Genet, actress Maria Casarès, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, and the socialite Hélène Rochas, as well as an illustrator, illustrating Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare, and often donating her drawings to new emerging writers.
In 1943, Fini was included in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York.
Fini spent the war years in Monte Carlo and Rome, continuing both her portraits and her "surreal" works with signature erotic, Gothic, and Mannerist qualities. It was in Rome that she met the Italian Count Stanislao Lepri. Fini returned to Paris in 1946.
Between 1946 and 1953, Fini had a very active social life and remained an influential and central figure of the high society, attending countless masked balls, always making the magazine headlines afterwards for her exuberant outfits.
At age of 45, Fini was painting prolifically and had also immersed herself in other creative endeavors. Her passion for extravagant masks and drama led her to doing some stage, costume, and poster design for various theatres and opera houses, including the Paris Opera and the Metropolitan Opera Association. Fini also designed the costumes for Frederico Fellini's movie "8 ½" in 1963, and in 1972 she designed Brigitte Bardot's costume for the Rothschilds' Ball.
In the 1970s, she also wrote three novels: "Rogomelec", "Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu" and "Oneiropompe".
Leonor Fini lived in her Parisian apartment, painting surrounded by her cats. Still active and painting well into her 80s, she died on February 18, 1996 in Paris, France.
Achievements
Leonor Fini was considered one of the most important women artists of the twentieth century. She was best known for her works "Self Portrait with Scorpion", "The Alcove: An Interior With Three Women" and "The Shepherdess of the Sphinx". Based on her work alone, Fini has been described as a European Frida Kahlo and as a "female Dali".
Her popularity in artistic social circles made her the subject of many poems, artworks, and photographs by various artists and writers of her time, including Man Ray, Lee Miller, Cecil Beaton, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Currently, her works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London, among others.
Fini is considered a great contributor to the feminist movement because her paintings often depict impertinent young women in scenes that empower their image.
Views
Quotations:
"Paintings, like dreams, have a life of their own and I have always painted very much the way I dream."
"I always imagined that I would have a life very different than the one imagined for me, but I understood from a very early age that I would have to revolt in order to make that life."
"Marriage never appealed to me, I've never lived with one person. Since I was 18, I've always preferred to live in a sort of community - a big house with my atelier and cats and friends, one with a man who was rather a lover and another who was rather a friend. And it has always worked."
Personality
From a very young age Fini developed a fascination with drawing as a means to understand the world around her. She loved making visits to the local morgue, where she sketched the cadavers in her own alternative, self-directed anatomy sessions.
At the age of seventeen, was generally considered highly intelligent and sensitive. Besides being generous, she was talented, glamorous, and often perceived as being profoundly controversial. Later she became also known for her eccentricity, flamboyant personality, and particularly theatrical ways of dressing. Moreover, art critic Catherine Styles McLeod describes her as "magnificent, perturbing, mocking enigmatic, terrible, and compassionate".
In addition, Leonor was a proud bisexual.
Physical Characteristics:
During her teenage years, Fini suffered from rheumatic conjunctivitis, which forced her to have her eyes bandaged and to live in total darkness for two months. She later recalls that this experience really helped to develop her imagination and to conceive complex visual imagery in her mind. The need to bandage her eyes may also have also inspired a later love of being masked.
Quotes from others about the person
Joseph Nechvatal: "Her wild lifestyle, open bisexuality, and infamous ménage à trois relationships shocked even the Parisian café society."
Sarah Kent: "She would dye her hair blue, orange, red or gold and attend private views and parties dressed as a man, or wearing nothing but white boots and a cape of white feathers."
Sarah Kent: "A gift for friendship - people loved her warmth, intelligence, and beauty."
Mathew Gale: "Leonor Fini is remembered for the exoticism of her imagery and her challenges to conventions."
Connections
Married once, for a brief period, to Federico Veneziani, they were divorced after she met the Italian Count, Stanislao Lepri, who abandoned his diplomatic career shortly after meeting Fini and lived with her thereafter. She met the Polish writer Konstanty Jeleński in Rome in January 1952. She was delighted to discover that he was the illegitimate half-brother of Sforzino Sforza, who had been one of her most favorite lovers. Jeleński joined Fini and Lepri in their Paris apartment in October 1952 and the three remained inseparable until their deaths.
