Leonor Fini - An Extraordinary Artist

Léonor Fini  1907 - 1986

Leonor Fini never knew what it was like to be "normal". Others would have wilted from the stresses of a traumatic childhood. Leonor Fini thrived, and became one of the 20th century's greatest artists and free thinkers. She lived for forty years in a menage a trois at a time when that was unthinkable. She was independent in thought and deed, and a painter of pictures of haunting beauty, a truly remarkable woman.

Fini was born in Argentina, but her mother fled to her native Trieste in Italy when Leonor was only a year old. For the next 6 years she lived in constant fear of her husband kidnapping their daughter and pretended that Leonor was really a boy, and dressed her as a boy to disguise her identity. Leonor was considered difficult (perhaps understandably so), and was expelled from every school she ever attended.

Paradoxically Leonor had a voracious appetite for learning along with a burning desire to be an artist. She taught herself by visiting the morgue and drawing the bodies as they arrived. She was fiercely independent and refused to accept restrictions of conventional life or artistic practice. She is thus regarded as self taught.

Leonor Fini held her first one person exhibition in Milan in 1922 when only 22 years old and moved to Paris permanently 7 years later. There she befriended and exhibited with the Surrealists but refused to be labeled a Surrealist herself. Eventually the world would give her a label all of her own, and she is regarded as a Post-Surrealist, a label subsequently extended to include other independent painters, but Leonor Fini is regarded as the definitive Post Surrealist. Her work is characterized by intense sensitivity, often erotically charged, and always provocative.

Leonor Fini became very close friends with the most influential Bohemians, artists and writers of the early 20th century such as Picasso, Eluard, Dali, and de Chirico. While Dali became notorious for eccentricities like wearing diving suits to exhibitions, it was Fini's great beauty and sexual adventurousness that scandalized the press, especially the fact that she lived openly in a menage-a-trois with Count Stanislao Lepri, a diplomat who became a painter, and Constanine Jelenski, the poet.

Equally fascinating to the press was her enduring beauty. She seemed to have learned the secrets of the Picture Of Dorian Grey, because as others grew old around her, she remained one of the most beautiful women in Paris. Looking at photographs of her in old age it is easy to believe that even in her 70's she would have still been capable of winning beauty contsts had she cared to enter any.

Her great legacy, her work is as diverse as any artist in the history of art could have been. Not content to be just a painter, she mastered the arts of printmaking, book illustration, stage design, and designed clothes and furniture. It almost goes without saying that she was a feminist well ahead of her time, and remains an inspiration for all who wish to spread their wings and fly.

Comments

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Born Today, Leonor Fini - admired by Picasso, Dali, etc for her haunting paintings. So ahead of their time she was unclassifiable.

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