GLR May-June 2023

particularly interested in the interpretation of dreams. She was extremely gifted as a painter but never received any formal ac ademic training. At age seventeen, she was already getting com missions for portraits and shows. She decided to move to Milan, the center of the Italian art scene, and quickly fell in with the Novecento group of Surrealists, which included Giorgio de Chirico. Her work was featured in their group show in 1929. In 1931, Fini decided to move to the ever dazzling and al luring city of Paris. Bright, temperamental, and utterly unique, she soon befriended quite a few of the best-known Surrealist artists: Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and René Magritte. She exhibited her work alongside these and other Surrealist artists in Paris, London, and New York, sharing their common interest in dreams, the unconscious, and psychic metamorphosis. Fini herself never accepted the label of “female artist,” and likewise never considered herself a Surrealist. Above all, she refused to sacrifice her independence to the dictates of André Breton, the leader of the movement, who held misogynistic views that she abhorred. Nonetheless, her works have been part of major Surrealism exhibitions. In 1936, her work was included in the exhibition titled Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, while simultaneously it was on dis play in a show with Max Ernst. Merging various influences in her meticulous brush strokes, lavish palette, and vivid textures with her interest in psycho analysis, philosophy, mythology, and sorcery, Fini’s subject matter is all about women, who appear in her work as strong, sexual creatures who dominate any canvas that they inhabit. Her paintings celebrated dreamlike environments, provocative rela tionships, human and animal transformation, ambiguity, and role reversal. Refreshingly for an artist, she depicted female sex uality from the perspective of a woman, not as an object of de sire for a man. Her most famous works include Self-portrait with a Scor pion (1938), Figures on the Terrace (1939), Alcove (1941), Woman Sitting on a Nude Man (1942), and Ideal Life (1950), along with numerous portraits—famously of Jean Genet—and especially self-portraits. Never a slave to convention, she also produced, in 1942, the first erotic male nude ever painted by a woman. One of the symbols she used, and inverted, in her art was that of the sphinx. Unlike those of the male Surrealists, hers is a female sphinx, who’s presented as erotic and omnipotent. In Sphinx Amoureux (1942), a male nude lies limp in the arms of a Fini-headed sphinx. She frequently portrayed men as passive and sometimes as androgynous figures. As the artist gained a reputation, her subject matter included erotic scenes of lesbianism. Fini freely acknowledged her ex perience of same-sex love but refused to accept a lesbian iden tity, remarking: “I am a woman and have had the ‘feminine experience’ but I am not a lesbian.” Her explicit homoerotic paintings include Le Long du Chemin ( 1967) and L’Entre-Deux (1967). Both depict an erotic scene involving two women. Then there are the Dalí-like surreal paintings with homo erotic images, notably Le leçon de botanique (1974), in which a nude female figure appears to be discoursing about female sexual anatomy, shown as a large close-up image in quasi human, quasi-botanical form. The expression on that figure’s face seems ecstatic rather than scientific. The other figure is an May–June 2023

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