Albany Fine Art : Biography of Leonor FINI

Leonor FINI

Argentinian/French, 1908-1996

Fini

France’s most celebrated female artist of the 20th century

Born to an Argentine father and an Italian mother in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1908, Leonor Fini was raised in Trieste, Italy, by a mother who had fled her "overly macho" Argentinian father. She was dressed as a boy until she reached puberty to disguise her from hired kidnappers sent by her father to abduct her to Argentina. Despite this, Fini grew up in a very cultivated, well-ordered, largely female household. As a child she suffered from an eye disease which obliged her to come to terms with the world of darkness and develop an inner vision in which she visualised all kinds of fantastic images. This experience was to affect her for the rest of her personal and artistic life for, with her sight restored, she decided to become an artist and applied herself to the task with passion, determination and conviction.

With no formal training, she taught herself anatomy by studying corpses in the Trieste mortuaries. She held her first exhibition in Trieste and, at 17, left the family home and settled in Milan where she held further exhibitions and enjoyed great success. Soon thereafter she moved to France where she remained for the rest of her life, eventually becoming France's most celebrated female artist.

Fini never considered herself a Surrealist, though she maintained close personal relationships with several members of the group and included work in several important Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s. Whilst she shared their interest in dreams, reverie, psychic transformation, and the poetics of suggestion and allusion, her work remained firmly rooted in the traditions of Symbolism, Metaphysics and Italian and German Romanticism. Her earliest figurative work reveals a debt to post-World War I classicism but, by the 1930s, she had evolved a highly personal and evocative symbolic figuration. This was combined with a powerful draughtsmanship in a series of complex and probing portraits. Over the next decades, she elaborated a rich, evocative, and often theatrical, visual universe in which women and animals served as carriers of powerful psychic forces.

Fini adored cats (Egyptian symbols of dignity and power) and identified herself with the sphinx, the mythological hybrid of lion and woman. Both sphinx and cat imagery predominated in much of her strongest work in the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s. Fini never married and died in 1996.