GLR May-June 2023

ESSAY

Léonor Fini, Impresario of the Self E MILY L.Q UINT F REEMAN

“I PAINT PICTURES which don’t exist and which I would like to see” (“ Je peins des tableaux qui n’existent pas et que je voudrais voir ”). That is how Léonor Fini (1907–1996) summed up her artistic quest as a painter. She was one of the most wildly creative artists and iconoclasts of the mid-20th century. Diversely gifted, for the six decades of her career Fini realized her artistic potential not only in easel art forms but also in set design, book illustration, commercial art, and costume design for theater, opera, ballet, and cinema. She also wrote three novels, one of which, Rogomelec (1979), has been translated into English. The artist was a friend and/or lover to some of the leading figures in literature and the arts, and was universally acknowl edged for her beauty, intellect, imagination, and passion. Dur ing the peak of her fame in the 1930s, she was known as the “Queen of Paris,” attending balls and making headlines with her flamboyant attire. In many ways, she became the impresa rio of her own life, parts of which are akin to a piece of per formance art. Today, Léonor Fini is seldom written about or her paintings shown in gallery or museum exhibitions. It seems to me that Fini’s work is still rather indigestible for the establishment art world: too pansexual, too feminist, too out there. Also, her extensive œuvre reaches into so many genres as to defy classification, which is something that tends to vex both art critics and museum curators. I had no idea who Léonor Fini was until one spring morning when I was exploring the 1st arrondissement in Paris on foot. This district of Hausmann-era boulevards and parks is the heart of the original city and what was once the seat of royal power in Paris, its most famous at traction being the Louvre Museum. Near the Jardin du Palais-Royal, I turned onto a diagonal street, Rue de la Vrillière. Nothing special, just a granite silo of walls with retail below and apartments above. I stopped for a mo ment outside the glass and wrought iron doors at no. 8 and peered inside, discovering a courtyard beyond, guarded by a stone sculpture on a plinth—a female sphinx, part crouching lion, part human, with full breasts and flowing hair. Above the exterior door, there was a commemorative plaque, the kind you see all over Paris, marking the residence or birthplace of a notable person. This one read as follows (I’ve translated into English):

L ÉONOR F INI (30A UGUST 1907–18 J ANUARY 1996) P AINTEDAND L IVED IN THIS H OUSE FROM 1961 TO 1996

Well, anyone with a mythological woman on a stone platform outside her apartment must be worth finding out more about. So I headed to my favorite bookstore on the Left Bank, Shake speare & Company, and asked the clerk to fill me in. She smiled slyly and answered in French: “ Elle était formidable. Vraiment parisienne.” Another barrage of French ended with: “Elle ai mait les chats” (“She loved cats”) . The Centre Pompidou, the most important Paris museum of modern art, directed me to books on Surrealism to learn more about Fini. What I’ve discovered in my research has confirmed my first impression that she was truly extraordinary. All of the dots began to connect: the female sphinx outside her front door, and her fondness for felines, and the art that she produced. § B ORN IN A RGENTINA , Léonor Fini was still a baby when her par ents separated, at which point her mother took her back to her home in Trieste, Italy. Her father fought for custody and even tried to kidnap Léonor at one point, but her mother won out. As a studious teenager, Léonor read the writings of Freud and was

Cover Art: Léonor Fini’s Figures on a Terrace , 1938.

Emily L. Quint Freeman is the author of Failure to Appear: Re sistance, Identity and Loss (2020), a memoir. A collection of her essays and creative nonfiction is in the works.

Léonor Fini, The Botany Lesson , 1974. Obelisk Art History.

TheG & LR

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