The Sphinx’s Gaze

Leonor fini

“Some remember [Leonor Fini] dressed eccentrically, with a cat or lioness mask, and a feather wig. A painter of bizarre canvases with figures of metamorphic women, half angel and half skeleton, half plant and half animal, half Amazon and half statue – she incarnated the revolutionary ideal of independence and self invention. She was the incarnation – as Joycelyne Godard has suggested – of infinite realtà possibili.” — Ernestina Pellegrini 

It’s easy to conflate feminism and the existence of famous female artists with the idea that the art world operates on an equal playing field. New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz took aim at the Museum of Modern Art (“MoMa”) for its lack of female representation, suggesting its curators disregard their master narrative and display a sign outside the museum reading, “Pardon our appearance while we remove the stick from our asses, discard our atavistic linear idea of art, and lay out more of the whole story.” According to Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), lauded by the Royal Academy as one of the greatest living artists, the paucity of female representation is simply because women lack the basic character to become great artists, telling Der Spiegel that, “women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.” They “simply don’t pass the market test, the value test. As always, the market is right.” Despite the pervasive narrative of equality and inclusion, in reality, misogynism is being reinforced by a new generation. It’s not enough to show “women’s art”, as this perpetuates the problem of seeing art by women through a binary gender lens. In the interests of opening up art history, the little-known Argentine-Italian artist Leonor Fini (1907-1996), one of the most important, idiosyncratic, and misunderstood artists of the 20th century, is deserving of more attention. Currently listed in MoMA’s online collection — which features more than 84,000 works — is a single portrait of Fini by the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), but nothing by the artist herself. The fact that Fini’s extraordinary legacy has been so largely ignored is one of the biggest travesties of art-history. Fini abhorred pre-fabricated notions of what a “woman artist” should represent; she thought of herself as androgynous, and her lack of an association with any particular male artist ( like Leonora Carrington’s (1917-2011) with Max Ernst (1891-1976), and Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) with her husband Robert (1885-1941)) might be one of the reasons why she is so under-recognised.

As a little-known artist, Fini rejected a personal invitation from Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) to help pioneer surrealism (prescient perhaps, given his later, patronising assessment of her work as “Better than most, perhaps. But talent is in the balls”) rejecting not only the women-as-muse view of the movement’s leader, André Breton, but also art history’s approach to one of the most popular subjects in all artistic media — the female nude. (Not to mention any notions of gender norms, which are, of course, still common to this day.) In Breton’s second Surrealist Manifesto (1929), he wrote that “the problem of woman is the most marvellous and disturbing problem in all the world” (Breton was also a self-proclaimed fervent anti-fascist, yet he banished René Crevel from his surrealist clique, claiming the poet’s homosexuality was corrupting the movement — despite calling for a “complete freedom of art”, it would seem that right extended only to heterosexual men). The work of many surrealists objectified and dehumanized women as a means of dealing with their own anxieties. Woman was the object of man’s desire and fear. She did not possess the active, subjective need for self-definition and artistic expression. Due to this complete lack of recognition, those artists, like Fini, who identified with the Surrealist movement were forgotten, or simply left out. The art historical narrative is predominantly told from the position of privilege, often leaving the oppressed and marginalized by the wayside, left to stagnate in a history that posits them in a social construct called “the Other”, thereby designating them as outside mainstream culture. Through this concept, the dominant centre of the art world is granted a sense of authority to decide which artists, art works and art forms should be esteemed as “universal” embodiments of creative expression and which artists should be deemed as minor contributors, whose work is not essential to the artistic canon.

Leonor Fini, Paris (c. 1938) Anonymous, c/o Leonor Fini Estate

Portrait de femme aux feuilles d’acanthe (“Portrait of a Woman With Acanthus Leaves”) (1948) by Leonor Fini

Born in Buenos Aires of mixed Spanish, Italian, Argentine and Slavic blood, Leonor was raised in Trieste by her single mother where she absorbed the multi-ethnic and mixed cultural heritage of her surroundings. When she was a year old, during the course of an acrimonious divorce, her father tried to kidnap her, and so for a number of years thereafter she went out disguised as a boy. (This likely initiated a lifelong fascination for dressing up, with masquerade playing an important part of her adulthood). Headstrong and with a profoundly rebellious spirit, Fini was expelled from three schools for her inability to follow the “rules”. Virtually self-taught as an artist, from the age of 13 she learnt composition and technique from the Old Masters, reading voraciously in her uncle's library, and visiting countless museums during her travels around Europe. Perhaps more unusually, she studied the human physical form at her local morgue, where she would sketch cadavers in her own alternative, self-directed anatomy session. Fini remained fascinated by the corporeality of the body, an interest that would run throughout her work; as in L'ange de l'anatomie (“The Angel of Anatomy”) (1949), in which she depicts herself as a winged figure stripped of skin. As a young woman she exhibited her paintings in Trieste and Milan, received commissions for portraits and formed close friendships with some of the leading Italian artists of the day. Somewhat paradoxically, Fini’s work can be seen both as a constructed artifice (rather than the authentic “truth”) and as an embodiment of self. She used her own body both a locus for herself and as a tool for artistic creation. Through her life, every aspect of which she lived creatively, and in canvas, she experimented with gender and sexuality as an investigation into the human psyche.

In 1931, in her early twenties, along with her fiancé, Prince Lorenzo Ercole Lanza del Vasto di Trabia, Fini moved to Paris to forge a career as an artist. She was ambitious and, as art critic Sarah Kent writes, had “a gift for friendship — people loved her warmth, intelligence, and beauty”. It was at this time that she met Max Ernst (twenty-six years her senior), who, after she abandoned her prince, became her lover, introducing her to the Surrealists, including Man Ray (1890-1976), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) along with many other painters and writers of the group. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) praised Fini’s paintings as possessing a quality of “réalisme irréel,”  and Paul Eluard (1895-1952), Jean Genet (1910-1986), Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) were amongst her first sponsors. Although an integral part of the Parisian art scene and social circles, Fini declined the confining roles (muse, lover, student) that were usually offered to young women. She was uninterested in contemporary movements, and refused to be defined or boxed in any way, which has, to some extent, made it difficult to categorise her work. Although she showed in the first major Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s and 40s, Fini's staunch individuality was often at odds with the collective ideas of the group; in particular, she felt the co-founder André Breton was a misogynist and didn’t want to be part of something with a dogma. In much of the surrealist oeuvre, women are reduced either to a femme enfant, a muse, and object of man’s desires (as Breton viewed both Fini and his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, the inspiration for his L’Amour fou (“Mad Love”) (1937)), or a femme-fatale, the threatening seductress who consumes and controls man. The former is in direct conflict with a woman’s independence and need for self-definition, the latter posits women as cruel and destructive, a purely misogynistic view. Fini rejected those who called her a surrealist, or even a “woman artist”, instead using the surrealist framework (she shared their interest in dreams and the unconscious) to celebrate women in a variety of personas and expressions, rather than reducing them to a basic binary.

La Bergère des Sphynx (“The Shepherdess of the Sphinx’s”) (1941) by Leonor Fini

Fini described her art-making process thusly: “I strike it, stalk it, try to make it obey me. Then in its disobedience, it forms things I like.” Her work was fantastical, but stands out from the surrealists for its inversion of the usual gender roles; women, often depicted in roles of dominance, are in stark contrast to her portraits of men, which often, as she claimed, were “unthreatening” and “of ambiguous sexuality”. Like the surrealists, she had muses, but her depictions are affectionate, rooted in the personal connection she had to her subjects, such as her two lifelong partners, Stanislao Lepri (1905-1980) and Constantin Jelenski (1922-1987). She rejected art’s traditional gender roles and social codes, depicting women as powerful, autonomous and complex figures, with unprecedented sexual prowess and agency, for e.g. in Femme assise sur un homme nu (Woman Seated on a Naked Man) (1942) she perches on a languid sleeping male nude.

Most of the characters in her paintings, which pull iconography from magic and mythology, were either female, or at the very least androgynous; an emancipation from the confines her male counterparts placed on their identity. Femme assise sur un homme nu is often cited as the first ever erotic nude portrait of a man painted by a woman. (Of the painting she said in a 1982 interview, “The man in my painting sleeps because he refuses the animus role of the social and constructed and has rejected the responsibility of working in society toward those ends.”) Fini was particularly interested in the interplay between the dominant female and the passive male, and in many of her most powerful works the female takes the form of the sphinx; with which she claimed to feel a strong identification, having been fascinated by the mythological beast since childhood. The sphinx — with a lion’s body, the wings of an eagle and the head of a woman — became her beloved mascot, her confidant and model. Fini creates her own image of woman, portraying the female sphinx as a dominant force, projecting the feminine gaze, thus conflating binaries of the adoring muse and the menacing whore. As Max Ernst said: “Her paintings are made up of vertigo… inhabited by the most astonishing collection of legendary beings … Miraculous plays of darkness and light are given ultimate expression in the pulsating pearly colours of this chimerical flesh, that resembles the bifid love-making of sphinxes.”

Fini had her first solo show in Paris when she was twenty-five at a gallery directed by Christian Dior (1905-1957) (before he switched to fashion). Her work caught on fast and Fini had three paintings in the ground-breaking 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA, curated by the museum’s founder, Alfred H. Barr Jr and a show at the avant-garde gallery of Julien Levy, the New York dealer who helped introduce artists like Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Salvador Dalí to America. A somewhat puritanical review in the The New York Times admonished Fini for showing too much skin in a self-portrait: “In one picture, called ‘The Miracle That Sweeps,’ the ‘costume’ pantaloons worn by our miraculous heroine have just about dropped off.” When two of her works — Game of Legs in a Key of Dreams and the White Weapon — appeared in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, featuring young women engaged in bizarre, mildly erotic rituals, she earned the ultimate contrarian badge of honour, scandalizing the Daily Mail critic who described them as “a couple of slaps on the face of decency that should not be allowed to pass unnoticed.”

In Paris in 1939 Fini curated the inaugural exhibition of her friend Leo Castelli’s first gallery (of surrealist furniture) and shortly thereafter, just before the German occupation, she travelled with André and a new lover to Arcachon in the southwest of France to begin waiting out the war. She remained there for almost a year with Salvador and Gala Dali (painting portraits of her friends, including writer Jean Genet, actress Maria Casarès (1922-1996), ballerina Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991), and the socialite Hélène Rochas (1927-2011)) before moving to Monte Carlo where she met the Italian Count Stanislao Lepri, who abandoned a prodigious diplomatic career for a creative and experimental life by Fini's side. As the war intensified she moved with Lepri to Rome where she lived, worked and formed close friendships with Anna Magnani (1908-1973), Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) and other leading figures of world of art and letters.

Dans la tour, oil on canvas (1952) by Leonor Fini

After the Liberation of Paris in 1946 she returned there to live and work for the remainder of her life. Fini’s work grew darker and more abstract. She chose to live as something of a recluse, making only brief appearances at formal events, dressed in elaborate costumes of her own design; one of which included an owl mask, inspired the final scene in the erotic novel Histoire d’O. “I did’t go to dance of dine or make conversation. I went to dazzle and render people speechless. If I could do that I was happy”. In 1952, she met the Polish writer, Konstanty Jelenski, known as Kot, who moved in with her and Lepri in Paris; the three remained inseparable until their deaths. The art critic Joseph Nechvatal wrote, “her wild lifestyle, open bisexuality, and infamous ménage à trois relationships shocked even the Parisian café society”.

Fini believed she had multiple personalities, and not limiting herself to the four sides of a canvas, her production included: erotic illustrations to accompany a 1944 edition of the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette (printed secretly on the Vatican press), dazzling sets and costumes for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet Palais de Crystal, Roland Petit’s company Ballets de Paris, and Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, as well as over seventy productions at theatres in Paris between 1946 and 1969. She had a unique talent for film design, creating costumes for Federico Fellini’s (1920-1993)  8 ½, as well as for Renato Castellani's (1913-1985) Romeo and Juliet and John Huston’s (1906-1987) A Walk with Love and Death. She wrote (authoring three novels), and collaborated on designs for furniture and fashion – in the case of the latter, devising the female torso-shaped bottle to hold Elsa Schiaparelli’s perfume Shocking, which she modelled on Mae West’s torso. (Fini later employed a similar idea for a corset-shaped chair that appeared in a furniture exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery.) She continued to paint — her works becoming more dreamlike — but still with the predominant themes of sexual tension, mysteries and games. In 1965 she was given a retrospective in Belgium, followed by one in Japan in 1972 and Paris in 1986; yet after her death in 1996, Fini, like so many of her female contemporaries, had been relegated to the footnotes, to the extent that the French government refused her paintings in lieu of taxes. (This is of course a familiar story, and one wonders if things have really changed or if Tracy Emin and Cindy Sherman et al will receive the same treatment.)

Fini is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, but also one of the most misunderstood. Catherine Styles McLeod of Architectural Digest wrote in 1986: “Her art is the crack in the mirror, the edge of the equation, the dream of tremendous important half-grasped upon awakening, whose meaning dissolves with daylight.” Her fiercely independent character granted her an almost mythic status in the international art world. Always controversial, with as many detractors as admirers, she lived and painted consummately on her own terms. Aware of the importance of showing a lineage of artists exploring gender and sexuality, she looked back to the art of the early renaissance which, freed from obligations of religious worship and piety, became a voice for sexuality (in both conventional and unconventional modes), as well as gender identity and intellectual freedom. Her women are ambiguous and complex figures — priestesses, witches, and, above all, sphinxes — subverting preconceived gender roles and social codes. Not always in critical favour, they exist in a world of their own, outside the negative feminine tropes with which they have been shackled, reifying the artist’s ideas of female empowerment and liberation. Fini lived passionately through her art and friendships and in the process became one of modernism’s greatest feminist vanguards; always ready to defy expectations — starting with the sheer fact that she was a woman. Decades before any discussion of the so-called “female gaze”, Fini explored sexuality, desire, femininity and what it means to look and be looked at. Consistently challenging the status quo, Fini upended the very concept of the nude in art, celebrating the androgyny and feminine qualities in her male subjects — an approach since embraced by the likes of Andy Warhol and Madonna. As she once declared, “I have always loved, and lived, my own theatre.”

Ben Weaver