Fini, Leonor
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 Leonor Fini
“… a most talented and fascinating woman. Like a character from the Italian Renaissance, her beauty is wild, strange and flamboyant. She is a flame in the shape of a woman”
-Erte, 1975
Things I Remember
Born in 1907 in Buenos Aires to an Argentine father and an Italian mother, Leonor Fini’s life began in confusion and turmoil. Her parent's divorce, before her first birthday caused her mother to leave South America for Trieste, Italy. It is widely known that Leonor's father tried on numerous occasions to kidnap her, a plot foiled by an ingenious and determined mother, who dressed her daughter as a boy in an attempt to hide her identity from her father.
Unhappy in the conventional school setting and traumatized by the effects of an eye disease in her teens which forced her to wear bandages over both eyes, Fini began to visualize within her own dark world. Her decision to become an artist was certainly influenced by this experience. By the age of seventeen, she was painting portraits of wealthy Italian sitters as well as ordinary citizens in Trieste, and in 1929, had her first one person show in Milan, followed in 1932, by her first show in Paris. Surrounded by her uncle's library and her mother's intelligence, the young Fini joined in discussions on politics, art and philosophy with the adults around her. She lived in the midst of the European avant-garde and began her journey as a painter with a sense of strong individuality and non-conformity. As a talented young woman in Paris, Leonor Fini came into contact with numerous luminaries of the time, including Andre Breton whose Surrealist Manifesto was not to her liking on many levels and, as a result, she refused to officially join the movement. She did however, align herself with many of the surrealists and did exhibit with them. Julien Levy gave Fini her first show in New York in 1936. She was represented at the Museum of Modern Art in the Dada and Surrealism Exhibition as well. When the renowned art dealer, Leo Castelli opened his first gallery at the Place Vendome, it was Leonor Fini, his childhood friend from Triese, who approached artists, gathered their works, created the decor including the furniture and organized the ground-breaking surrealist event.
Although best known for her paintings, drawings and prints, Fini was also a costume and set designer for operas and ballets, not the least of which, Le Reve de Leonor in 1949, her own creation. The author of many books and the illustrator of even more, Fini displayed her talents through these creations. She was a lover of cats and a painter of fantastic sphinxes, erotica and the metamorphosis of life and death. She had legendary friends, among them, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Maria Callas, Jean Genet, Georges Balanchine and of course, her two life long partners Constantin Jelinski and Stanislao Lepri as well as her dearest friend and the executor of her estate, famed photographer, Richard Overstreet. Leonor Fini died in Paris in 1996.
Many have analyzed the life and work of Leonor Fini. Doctoral dissertations have been written on the subject as have magazine articles, books and documentary films. My recommendation is to just look carefully at the magic and mystery in Fini's oeuvre and don’t over analyze it. Just allow yourself to be swept away in the experience. That’s exactly what I did the first time I saw a lithograph in a gallery window in New York and, that’s what I still do, some forty years later!
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Quick Facts
Born:
Buenos Aires Argentina
Died:
Paris
Type(s):
Artist
Painter
Style:
Categories Most Known For:
Artist Website:
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