In what was intended as the opening line of a 1951 catalogue essay to an exhibition by the painter Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau wrote: ‘There is always, at the margin of work by men, that luminous and capricious shadow of work by women.’ Not surprisingly, Fini excised it.
In what was intended as the opening line of a 1951 catalogue essay to an exhibition by the painter Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau wrote: ‘There is always, at the margin of work by men, that luminous and capricious shadow of work by women.’ Not surprisingly, Fini excised it. But it was an attitude that would plague her, and other female artists in Paris’s Surrealist milieu, for the rest of her life. Women were never formally admitted to the Surrealist movement, with which Fini’s vast output between 1930-1990 is most readily identified.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1907, Leonor Fini, born Eleonora, spent her childhood in Trieste, raised by her half-Slavic mother and Turkish-cigarette-smoking aunts. Fini’s mother had run away from her father, Herminio Fini, a domineering Italian who made one botched kidnap attempt on his daughter. Leonor was allowed to haunt the morgue in her early teens, a renegade from school, and her youthful artistic attempts are not remarkable, although lively, spatially aware and capable.
Peter Webb points out that Trieste was polyglot and cosmopolitan. Fini’s uncle’s circle included James Joyce and a 40-year-old gay painter, Arturo Nathan, who befriended Fini and gave her a copy of Huysman’s A Rebours, and whose painting style she emulated. Travels with her mother took in Gustav Klimt, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Egon Schiele in the galleries of Vienna.
Webb’s writing style is curious, often sounding as if it had been translated from another language, perhaps echoing transcripts of conversations with the artist.
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