Leonor Fini

Leonor Fini was a surrealist painter, designer, illustrator and author, known for her depictions of powerful and erotic women. Fini lacked formal artistic training but grew up surrounded by the renaissance and Mannerist styles of Italy. Though Fini is part of the pre-war generation of Parisian artists often overlooked in favour of male contemporaries, she was very important in the Surrealist movement. Fini never officially joined it though she did show her work alongside other Surrealist artists. Over the course of seven decades, Leonor Fini produced an extensive body of work encompassing paintings, drawings, book illustrations and set and costume design for theater, ballet, opera, and film. Today, she is regarded as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, widely celebrated for developing a visual language untethered to contemporaneous styles or movements, one distinctly the artist’s own. The inversion of traditional gender roles occupies a principal force in Fini’s oeuvre, and the figure of the sphinx—a mythical creature combining the head of a woman, often the artist’s, with the body of a lion—most powerfully embodies her proclamations of female sexuality, desire, and agency. Many of Fini’s paintings featured women in positions of power or in sexualized contexts. Madonna (born 1958) used the imagery of Fini’s Le Bout du Monde in her video, Bedtime Story in 1994.

Fini was born in Buenos Aires to Malvina Braun Dubich (born in Trieste, with German, Slavic and Venetian ancestry) and her husband Herminio Fini (with ancestry from Benevento, Italy). Herminio was a handsome and very wealthy man, but also tyrannical with extreme religious views. He made his young wife very unhappy, and, within eighteen months of Leonor’s birth, she fled back to Trieste with the child. These traumatic experiences, combined with the effects of a, temporary, eye infliction would greatly influence Finis art, once she, after recovering, decided to become an artist. Kasmin Gallery writes (in their presentation of Fini):

Born in Buenos Aires to Italian parents, Leonor Fini quickly moved to Trieste, Italy, where her mother fled her oppressive father within eighteen months of Fini’s birth. Following a kidnapping attempt orchestrated by her father, Fini began disguising as a boy in public, birthing a lifelong fascination with masquerade and an aura of mystique that would later become a touchstone of her artistic practice. In her teenage years, Fini suffered from an illness which left her eyes bandaged for two months, catalyzing the evolution of an artistic lexicon drawn from dreams, the imagination, and the human psyche.

Having moved to Milan, at the age of 17, in 1924, Fini discovered the Italian Mannerists and soon began participating in group exhibitions. After a while she started to receive commissions from dignitaries in Milan to paint their portraits. Fini would later become renowned for her work in this particular genre a genre with famous examples depicting such artists, writers, and public figures as Leonora Carrington (1917 - 2011), Lady Diana Cooper (1892 – 1986, The Right Honourable Viscountess Norwich, an English silent film actress and aristocrat who was a well-known social figure in London and Paris), Jean Genet (1910 – 1986, French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life a vagabond and petty criminal), Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985) and André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909 – 1991, French writer and associate of the Surrealists. He was a particularly close friend of Leonor Fini), among many others.

At the age of 24 she moved to Paris in 1931. There, she became acquainted with Carlo Carrà (1881 - 1966) and Giorgio de Chirico (1888 - 1978) who influenced much of her work and introduced her to the Surrealists. Disavowing the misogyny of the group’s leader, André Breton (1896 – 1966), Fini boldly rejected an invitation to formally join the Surrealist group, though she continued to exhibit and socialize with such figures as Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell (1903 – 1972), Man Ray (1890 – 1976), Meret Oppenheim, Paul Éluard (1895 - 1952), Max Ernst (1891 - 1976), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 - 2004), Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973), André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Salvador Dalí (1904 - 1989).

She traveled Europe by car with Mandiargues and Cartier-Bresson where Cartier-Bresson took a photograph, one of his best known, of her naked in a pool with a shaved pubis. The photograph of Fini sold in 2007 for $305,000 – the highest price paid at auction for one of Cartier-Bresson’s works to that date.

Fini’s first solo exhibition in Paris was mounted in 1932 at the Galerie Bonjean, where Christian Dior (1905 – 1957, French fashion designer and founder of one of the world’s top fashion houses) then served as director. Her work soon rose to prominence following her inclusion in the pivotal exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936, the same year she began exhibiting with the New York-based gallerist, and champion of Surrealist art, Julien Levy (who later gave Dorothea Tanning two solo exhibitions in 1944 and 1948). In 1943 Fini was also included in Peggy Guggenheim’s (1898 - 1979) legendary show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York.

Fini’s creative output had already begun to surpass the boundaries of the visual arts by this time and, working for Elsa Schiaparelli (1890 – 1973, Italian fashion designer who created the house of Schiaparelli in Paris in 1927. Starting with knitwear, Schiaparelli’s designs celebrated Surrealism and eccentric fashions. Her collections were famous for unconventional and artistic themes like the human body, insects, or trompe l’œil), she notably designed the bottle and packaging of Schiaparelli’s perfume Shocking in 1937, based on the shape of Mae West’s (1893 – 1980, American actress, singer, comedian, screenwriter, playwright, and sex symbol whose career spanned over seven decades) torso. Fini’s extravagant and eccentric dresses embellished with masks and ripped clothing, often captured in photographs by Lee Miller (1907 - 1977) and Dora Maar (1907 - 1997), would also launch Fini into a well-recognized fashion icon.

Fini networked into theatre circles when she started taking on costume design projects in the 1930s as a source of extra income. She also illustrated books and some of her best-known works in this area are her drawings for a 1944 edition of the Marquis de Sade’s (1740 – 1814, French writer, political activist and nobleman best known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy and pornography) Juliette. Between 1944 and 1972, Fini’s main work was in costume design for film, theatre, ballet and opera including, famously, the first ballet performed by Roland Petit’s (1924 – 2011, French ballet company director, choreographer and dancer) Ballet de Paris, Les Demoiselles de la nuit, featuring a young Dame Margot Fonteyn DBE (1919 - 1991) in 1948. In 1949, Sir Frederick Ashton OM CH CBE (1904 – 1988) choreographed a ballet she had conceptualized, Le Rêve de Leonor (“Leonor’s Dream”), with music by Benjamin, Baron Britten OM CH (1913 – 1976), Fini designed the hybrid human-animal costumes for it as well. Fini also designed the costumes for two films: Renato Castellani’s (1913 – 1985) Romeo and Juliet (1954) and John Huston’s (1906 – 1987, Academy Award winning American film director) A Walk with Love and Death (1968).

Fini illustrated many works, about 50 books, by classic authors and poets including William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849) and Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867), as well as texts by new writers, like Jean Genet. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for the sexually explicit Histoire d’O. In the 1970s, Fini also wrote three novels: Rogomelec, Moumour; Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe.

In London, she exhibited paintings at the Kaplan gallery in 1960 and at the Hanover Gallery in 1967. A 1986 retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris featured over 260 of her works in a variety of media including watercolours and drawings, theatre/costume designs, paintings and masks. In her lifetime, Fini was the subject of retrospective exhibitions in Belgium (1965); Italy (1983); Japan (1972-73, 1985-86) and France (1986). Additional retrospectives were staged posthumously at institutions in Germany (1997-98); Japan (2005); Italy (2005, 2009) and Sweden (2014). The artist’s first museum survey in the United States of America was staged at New York’s Museum of Sex from 2018 until 2019, followed by a solo exhibition at the Lilley Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Reno in 2021. In 2021 and 2022, her work was included in the expansive exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern in London. In 2022, Fini was prominently included in The Witch’s Cradle, one of five historical sections embedded within The Milk of Dreams, the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale.

Examples of Fini’s works can be found in esteemed collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, United States of America; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, United States of America; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Miyazaki Prefectural Art Museum, Japan; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; the Musée de Grenoble, France; Museo Revoltella, Trieste, Italy; the Museum of Modern Art, Brussels; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy and Tate Modern, London, among others.

A catalogue raisonné of the artist’s oil paintings was published in 2021, authored by Fini experts Richard Overstreet and Neil Zukerman. An authoritative biography by art historian Peter Webb was published in 2007 (translated to English in 2009), and the artist’s personal papers and library, previously housed in the Leonor Fini Archives directed by Overstreet in Paris, are now held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

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