Leonor Fini

Leonor Fini (born August 30, 1907, Buenos Aires, Argentina—died January 18, 1996, Paris, France) was an Argentine-born Surrealist artist known for her Gothic paintings that explore female sexuality and identity. The use of symbolic, mythological imagery, in particular that of a sphinx (a creature with a lion’s body and a human head), became the trademark of her work.

Fini’s parents separated when she was a baby, and she was raised by her mother in Trieste, Italy. As a child, she was fascinated by death and decay and visited the Trieste morgue to make anatomy sketches of the cadavers. Though she had little formal art training and was expelled from a series of schools throughout her youth, Fini read about art in books from her uncle’s library, traveled widely, and visited art museums throughout Europe. In her teens she suffered from rheumatic conjunctivitis and was required to wear bandages on both eyes for two months. The artist later recalled that living in the dark had given her the opportunity to form and visualize elaborate images from her imagination. Her earliest paintings were portraits (a genre she returned to throughout her life), such as Portrait de Triestine (1925) and Portrait of Malvina Braun Fini (1925), her mother. She exhibited her first works publicly in Trieste at age 17 and then two years later in Milan.

In 1931 Fini left for Paris, where she connected with the Surrealists, including Paul Éluard, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí. She quickly became known for her eccentricity, which she exhibited not only in her art but with her costumelike clothing and theatrical behavior. Though she did not—and never would—become an official member of the group (and was never fond of the group’s leader, André Breton), she exhibited with them in London in 1936, and her work began to explore Surrealist themes—dreams and the unconscious, mythological and fantasy motifs, and metamorphoses of the mind and body. Her paintings also show the influence of Italian Mannerism, German Romanticism, and the Pre-Raphaelites, all of which she had come across in her museum trips as a girl. Fini’s work was also introduced in the United States at that time. In 1936 Julien Levy showed her work at his gallery in a joint exhibition with Ernst, and curator Alfred Barr included her in his landmark exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art that year.

Like many other Surrealists, Fini worked in a variety of media beyond painting and drawing. She designed jewelry, furniture, fashion, and costumes. In the late 1930s Fini collaborated with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Fini sketched Schiaparelli’s designs for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and designed a female torso-shaped bottle for the designer’s 1937 perfume called Shocking. Two years later Fini organized an exhibition of contemporary and antique furniture at the René Drouin and Leo Castelli Gallery in Paris, for which she submitted Corset Chair (1939), a functional chair that looked like a corset (similar in shape to the perfume bottle, which had been modeled on the figure of actress Mae West), complete with mother-of-pearl stays.

In her paintings, which were considered both erotic and somewhat frightening, Fini explored the power dynamics between men and women. Hybridity became an overarching theme in her paintings and drawings. She often used the sphinx to represent a powerful or autonomous woman, and it became something of an alter ego for her. Sphinx Amalburga (1942; also called Sphinx Amoureux), for example, shows a male nude lying limp in the arms of a Fini-headed sphinx. The sphinx occupied her paintings throughout the 1940s in particular, and she eventually saw the sphinxes of Egypt firsthand in 1951. Fini repeatedly overturned Surrealist patriarchal conventions by painting women in positions of power and men as passive and, sometimes, androgynous figures. The cat also served as a prominent trope in Fini’s work. Cats—creatures she knew well, having reportedly cared for 17 of them at one point in her life—appeared in her earliest paintings as well as those she produced as late as the mid-1990s.

Fini spent the war years in Rome and Monte Carlo and painted many portraits and self-portraits in those years, adhering to her Gothic tone. In 1942 she was included in an all-woman exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York City, with, among others, Frida Kahlo, Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning. Fini returned to Paris in 1946 and spent the rest of her years in France, in her country home in the Loire valley, and on the island of Corsica. She continued to portray erotic, fantastic, and grotesque subject matter throughout the 1950s and ’60s, but, as she aged, those paintings became more colorful and decorative, as in The Anatomy Lesson (1966) and her series of paintings depicting women facing one another in a train compartment (1960s).

Fini was internationally known for designing sets and costumes for the theater, opera, and ballet. She designed for productions at the Paris Opéra, the Comédie Française, La Scala in Milan, and other theaters in European as well as North American cities. She also illustrated numerous books, including the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette (1944), Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O (1962; Réage was the pen name of Dominique Aury), and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1964). She also notably designed costumes for several films—including two major motion pictures, Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death (1969).