Leonor Fini

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Leonor Fini, portrayed by Carl Van Vechten in 1936

Leonor Fini (born August 30, 1907 in Buenos Aires , † January 18, 1996 in Paris ) was an Italian surrealist painter .

life and work

Leonor Fini was the daughter of Malvina Braun Dubich from Trieste , whose mother had South Slavic, German and Venetian ancestors and whose father came from Sarajevo . Fini's father's family came from Benevento . In 1909 her mother secretly left her husband in Argentina and returned to Trieste, where Leonor Fini grew up. In 1923 she was expelled from school for insubordination and henceforth self-taught in the family library.

In 1925 Fini moved to Milan , where she lived until 1937 and was already doing her first portraits as commissioned work. The first exhibition of her pictures took place here in 1929 - together with works by Arturo Nathan and Carlo Sbisà . There she made the acquaintance of Giorgio de Chirico . In 1936 she painted a portrait of Gogo Schiaparelli, the daughter of the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli .

In 1937 Leonor Fini stayed in Paris for the first time , where she made friends with the surrealist painters , including artists such as Salvador Dalí , Max Ernst , Man Ray , André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Georges Bataille . However, she was hostile to the manifestos and to the ideas she saw as dogmatic.

In the 1940s she lived mainly in Monte Carlo , where a number of portraits of well-known personalities, for example of Jean Genet , Anna Magnani , Jacques Audiberti , Alida Valli and Suzanne Flon , were created. In 1942 she met the Italian consul Stanislao Lepri in Monte Carlo , who switched to painting and was her partner until his death in 1980. From 1943 she started working on Mandiargues book Dans les Années sordides as an illustrator, in which she created a large number of book illustrations for works by Oskar Panizza , de Sade , Charles Baudelaire and William Shakespeare .

Leonor Fini's work for theater, ballet and opera began with the work on sets and costumes for the ballet Le Palais de Cristal by George Balanchine for the Paris Opera, which she accompanied for the rest of her life. Among the pieces she realized artistically were Wagner's Tannhäuser (1963), Lucrecia Borgia by Victor Hugo (1964) and Le balcon by Jean Genet (1969).

After 1945, the young Ernst Fuchs , who temporarily lived in Paris, caught her attention. In the seventies, Leonor Fini wrote three novels and continued her acquaintance with Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Moravia .

In 1994 she and the editor Joe F. Bodenstein prepared an exhibition of her graphics and drawings in Paris for the Museum Europäische Kunst at Schloss Nörvenich , in order to build on the exhibition successes of earlier years in Germany. Before that, she had exhibitions in Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Munich, Cologne and Bonn (Galerie Hermann Wünsche) for years. However, due to the artist's death, there was no longer a graphic retrospective in the presence of the painter.

Leonor Fini was the cousin of the jazz musician and painter Oscar De Mejo , husband of Alida Valli .

reception

Many of her paintings are about erotic fantasies and death. Fini's work received high international attention during his lifetime. After her death, she was honored by an exhibition in the "Galerie de Minsky" in Paris.

Exhibitions

  • 1995: Watercolors, drawings, graphics by Leonor Fini, MARCO Edition, Bonn (Fini-Archiv, EKS )
  • 1996: Leonor Fini - Sphinx and painter, European Art Museum , Germany.
  • 1997: Leonor Fini and Wein, Pfalz-Galerie, Landau. Color catalog
  • 2014: Leonor Fini. Pourquoi pas? , Umeå Bildmuseet , Sweden.
  • 2019: Leonor Fini: Theater of Desire, Museum of Sex, New York.

literature

  • R. Zuch: Fini, Leonor . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 40, Saur, Munich a. a. 2004, ISBN 3-598-22780-9 , pp. 124-126.
  • Jose Alvarez (ed.): Leonor Fini. The big picture book. Desch, Munich 1975
  • John G. Bodenstein: Leonor Fini - Goddess and Sphinx . Theo Kautzmann (ed.). Catalog for the 1997 exhibition in Frank-Loebsches Haus , Landau in der Pfalz
  • Jean-Claude Dedieu: Leonor Fini: fêtes secrètes: dessins, Regard, 1978
  • Bernd-Ingo Friedrich : Leonor Fini: Book art and "sharp eroticism". In: Marginalia. Journal of book art and bibliophilia . Issue 216 (= 4, 2014) ISSN  0025-2948 pp. 30-37
  • Karoline Hille: Women's Games. Women artists in surrealism. Belser, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-7630-2534-3 .
  • Constantin Jelenski: Leonor Fini translator Joseph Keller, Starnberg 1968 / Büchergilde Gutenberg, Frankfurt 1968 and others . ISBN 3763216855 .
  • Women's Work: The Transformations of Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning , in: Annette S. Levitt: The genres and genders of surrealism, Palgrave MacMillan, 2000
  • Gerhard Lindner (Ed.): Leonor Fini. Peintre du Fantastique exhibition in the Panorama Museum Bad Frankenhausen 1998. Thomas, Leipzig 1997, ISBN 3-9805312-3-6 (German)
  • Esther Seldson: Leonor Fini: Italian Painter. Parkstone Press, 1997

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Year of birth according to Encyclopædia Britannica
  2. ↑ Woman with obstinacy in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from January 19, 2014, page 35
personal data
SURNAME Fini, Leonor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fini, Léonor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine-French surrealism painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Buenos Aires
DATE OF DEATH January 18, 1996
Place of death Paris