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 Biography: Born in
Buenos Aires, 1907, to an Argentine father and an Italian mother, the life
of Leonor Fini began in utter turmoil. Her parent's strife ridden
marriage ended before Fini was a year old. After their divorce, Fini's
mother gathered up Leonor and their belongings and returned to Italy.
Settling
in the northern Italian city of Trieste Fini's mother began a peaceful
new life. This was soon over as her ex-husband travelled to Italy to kidnap
Leonor and take back to Argentina. With no help from local authorities, and no legal
protection against such actions, Fini's mother nonetheless outwitted her
estranged husband. For six nightmare years she disguised Leonor as a boy
whenever they ventured out of the house. As absurd as this may seem, it
worked. Her husband gave up his mission and returned to Argentina, never
to be seen again. Fini's
career also began in a traumatic way. In her early teens she suffered an
eye disease that forced her to wear bandages on both eyes. Living
in a world of darkness for quite some time, she had little to do but develop
her inner vision. She spent her days and visualizing fantastic images,
and after her recovery, decided to become an artist.
As she did with everything
, Fini pursued art with passion, determination, and conviction. She visited
museums regularly, and studied renaissance masters, Mannerism, Romanticism
and the Pre Raphaelites. Instead of busying herself with the usual juvenile
concerns, Fini immersed herself in her uncle's large collection of art
books. Consequently, her talent grew rapidly and at the tender age
of seventeen, Fini had her debut exhibit in a Trieste gallery. More amazing,
word of her talent reached Milan, a major Italian art center. The city's
upper eschalon loved Fini's work and commissioned portraits by the young
master. This early display of talent earned her the friendship of renowned
Italian artists such as Funi, Carra, and Tosi. Her
early induction to Europe's plethora of avant garde movements caused her
to mature quickly in originality, philosophical development, and personality.
It also inspired her trademark sense of autonomy and non-conformism
which she embraced with the same passion as she did with art.
Her
eccentric persona and flamboyant dress was rivalled only by
Dali.
This was not posturing showmanship but a form of integral surrealist expression
that uses the entire body as theatre to protest against conventional society.
She was only eighteen when Fini arrived in Paris, but her art
quickly found its way into galleries. Art writer/curator Whitney
Chadwick says of this period in Fini's life:
"In
Paris she became a legend almost overnight. When one of the Surrealists
saw a painting of hers in a Paris gallery
in 1936 and sought out its creator, she arranged a rendezvous in a local
cafe and arrived dressed in a cardinal's scarlet robes, which she had purchased
in a clothing store specializing in clerical vestments.
'I liked the sacrilegious nature of dressing as a priest, and the experience
of being a woman and wearing the clothes of a man who would never know
a woman's body.' "
This bizarre, meeting,
prompted Eluard, Ernst, Magritte, and Brauner to introduce Fini to the
Surrealist Group. She developed friendships with the women members of the
movement and participated in surrealist exhibits. To everyone's complete
surprise Fini not only refused to join the group, she denied being
a surrealist. Though it is said she did not join because of
Andre Breton's authoritarian leadership, she had more fundamental
reasons. Like Dali and Artaud, Fini saw the group's obsession
with treatise and theories not as radical, but as a manifestation of
what Dali called "typical petit bourgeois mentality".
For her, surrealism
was beyond manifestos and theories. In the sexual realm, she found the
group homophobic and misogynist despite its endeavors to idealize women
and liberate sexual desire without the interference of morality.
John B.Myers, a gallery dealer who documented his experiences with surrealists,
wrote of this double standard:
Fini
was not without ideological contradictions of her own. Despite her
denial of being a surrealist, she adhered to many of surrealism's
tenants. In fact they played an integral role in her quest
to envision a "new woman". For instance, Fini claimed to use images
from her subconscious, adopted Georges Bataille's philosophy of a return
to the mythological, spiritual and visionary aspects of primal cultures.
She founded her methodology on surrealism's tenant of delving into the
self and described herself as living a life in revolt. She used surrealism
as both a weapon against the onslaught of prehistoric social conventions
and a tool for constructing a modern society that allowed female participation
in existence. According to art writer/educator Julie Byrd:
"Profound belief in the ability to
shape the exterior world according to one's desire is rare among women
of Fini's generation. Cultivating her own individuality, she placed her
own freedom and autonomy to a degree that seems the embodiment of the surrealist
ideal, but that was, in fact, equalled by few surrealists."
Refusal to consider herself a surrealist and her willingness to nonetheless
align herself with the movement was never an issue with the Surrealists.
It was not unusual for the group to seek allies and sympathizers from non-members and similar revolutionary movements. Picasso and Giacommetti were
among these allies, however their affiliations were temporary and sporadic..
She was perhaps the only outsider who consistently kept close to the group.
Fini's extensive oeuvre has been
an invaluable contribution to the development of a modern feminine consciousness,
but her version differed somewhat from the other women surrealists.
In contrast with Remedios Varo's ideal woman, Fini's was not cerebral,
mystical or ironic but authoritarian, sensual, and governed by passion.
She portrays them in an almost Amazonian sense: as goddesses, warriors,
and voluptuaries.
Compared with Tanning and Carrington, Fini's art did
not symbolically transfer female sexuality onto childhood, she placed
it within the adult realm. There is none of the resentment toward
masculinized society that appears in the other surrealist women's art.
Neither is there the subliminal but ubiquitous sense of determinism
that underlies much of their work. Varo and Kahlo, depict the masculine
position as arbitrary. Fini was too insolent for such kindness.
Her work simply ignores or reduces the masculine position to insignificance.
Whereas most of the other surrealist women's art contains statements about
female sexuality, Fini's is more a proclaimation and celebration of it.
The women in her art are at once beautiful and alluring, yet powerful and
threatening, embodying not only a female sexuality but that which had been
thought of as exclusively male. In that sense, Fini envisioned a
historically unique--and prophetic-- feminine sexual duality absent from
the other surrealist women's constructs.
After
WWII, Fini's career expanded. She designed theatre sets and costumes,
and did book illustrations. Her work has been exhibited in major
galleries and museums throughout the world. Although the surrealist moniker
followed her until her death in 1996, she always rejected categorization
of any kind. She changed styles often and employed various techniques
and media as if to shrug off her tenacious image as a "woman surrealist".
Her efforts had no affect on the public or the academia and perhaps never
will. It is almost impossible to consider her life and her art without
proclaiming her a surrealist--an extraordinary one at that.
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Principales Expositions Personelles:
Arts, Bruxelles 1956 Galerie Drouand-David, Paris 1957 Galerie Galatea, Turin 1959 Galerie Reve Droite, Paris 1963 Iolas Gallery, New York 1965 Grande exposition retrospective au Casino de Knokke-le-Zoute 1965 Galerie Iolas, Paris 1967 Hannover Gallery, Londres 1968 Galerie Torbandena, Trieste 1969 Galerie Brockstaedt, Hambourg 1969 Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne 1970 Galerie Isa Brachot, Bruxelles 1970 Galerie Lambert Monet, Geneve 1970 Galerie II Fauno, Turin 1972 Galerie Verriere, Paris 1972 Exposition retrospective au Japon (Toyko, Osaka, Kyoto) 1974 Galerie Altmann- Carpentier, Paris
Autres expostions Principales Expositions Collectives:
Fantastique, Bordeaux 1964 Le Surrealisme, Galerie Charpentier, Paris 1966 Labyrinthe, Berlin 1966 Art fantastique, Vienne 1968 Festival de Recklinghausen 1968 Art erotique, Lund 1968 Tresors du Surrealisme, Knokke-le-Zoute 1970 Surrealisme, Musee de Bordeaux 1970 Hommage a Durer, Nuremberg 1972 Le Surrealisme, Haus der Kunst, Munich et Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris 1974 Collection Peggy Guggenheim, Orangerie, Paris Elle a participe a la Biennale de Venice, a la Quadriennale de Rome, au Salon de Mai de Paris Ses tableaux se trouvent dans les musees d'Art moderne de Paris, Rome, Bruxelles, Grenoble, Trieste, Lodz (Pologne) Geneve, etc Notes Biographiques:
De culture très cosmopolite. De nature indépendante, elle quitta sa famille à 17 ans, résida ensuite à Milan puis adopta le classicisme et la peinture tonale de peintres comme Carrà. En 1933 elle quitte l'Italie pour Paris où elle fréquente André Breton et les Surréalistes; s'inspirant de leurs théories, elle réalise ses premiers dessins « automatiques ». Elle s'y lia d'amitié avec Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, sans jamais appartenir au groupe surréaliste. Elle partagea cependant leur goût du fantastique, du symbolisme onirique, qu'elle transpose dans ses œuvres avec un grande élégance, un goût sûr, le sens de l'harmonie décorative et une délicatesse rafinée. Elle ne fréquenta aucune école des Beaux-Arts et sa formation est entièrement autodidacte, d'où sans doute la difficulté de l'identifier à un courant particulier de l'art contemporain, car son évolution a surtout été marquée par des affinités électives et par son propre "Musée imaginaire". À ses débuts elle peignit de nombreux portraits dont ceux de Jean Genet, d'Anna Magnani, de Jacques Audiberti. Elle fut une extraordinaire illustratrice ; on lui doit notamment l'illustration de textes d'Edgar Poe, de Sade, et de Marcel Aymé. Leonor Fini a continué de peindre jusqu'à la fin de sa vie. 
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