Born in 1907 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to an Argentine father and an Italian mother, Leonor Fini from the very start, was a prodigy. Fiercely independent from early childhood, she would live one of the most fascinating lives and produce one of the most powerful oeuvres in 20th-century art history.
Fini was raised in Trieste, Italy, by a mother who fled her "overly macho" Argentine father. It was a highly cultured household, comprised mostly of women whose house guests included figures like James Joyce and Rainer Maria Rilke. Trieste was a crossroads of European cultures. Art Nouveau, Viennese Secessionist and traditional Baroque aesthetics predominated in her childhood, along with the everyday "commercial" imagery of elegant packaging and children's books. These influences, along with her beloved cats, would permeate Fini's artwork for the rest of her life.
Fini's mother dressed her as a boy until she reached puberty to disguise her from hired kidnappers sent by her father to abduct her to Argentina. After many failed attempts to retrieve his daughter this way, her father finally gave up and had minimal if any contact with her for the rest of his life.
Fini had read all of Freud by the time of la tentation, rencontre pendant la nuit (Temptation: Encounter in the Night) which she executed around the time she left home for good (1924-25). This painting represents the first important cornerstone of Weinstein Gallery's collection of her work. She was seventeen years old when she completed it. The painting is infused with sensuality, both beautiful and ominous, gentle but full of erotic connotations. Fini utilized universal motifs of intense, but often subtle, facial expression, literary and apocalyptic as well as redemptive imagery. All the work, no matter if it be macabre or overtly sexual, is extraordinarily beautiful and demonstrates great technical proficiency. Her mastery of watercolor is near legendary, producing very loose soft-hued visages of pointed but ambiguous emotional intensity, pieces such as "visage bleu" and the large and impressive "Leven" (possibly a semi-portrait of a friend).
Like Da Vinci, she learned anatomy through the studying of corpses which she found in Trieste morgues. The highly detailed sketches of her youth later gave way to highly gestural and increasingly simpler drawings, usually of women or scenes from literature, such as "étude pour Mr. Venus" or "le Concile d'amour". She showed a genius' gift for self-expression and self-tutelage, and a constant rebellion against regimented forms of education. Though she never attended art schools, she eventually became France's most celebrated female artist. Her first show was in Milan at the age of seventeen. Soon thereafter, she moved to France for good.
Fini enjoyed a lifetime love of theater, dance and masquerade balls. Often, she would make surprise appearances at events elaborately dressed, with a bizarre and wholly surrealistic entourage. She designed her own extremely complex costumes, which have also enjoyed success as fine art, and produced much in the way of theater costume and set design. The Paris Ballet, in gratitude for Fini's finding a benefactor who financed the company, produced an elaborate ballet with sets and costumes by Fini, entitled "Les demoiselles de la nuit" ( Ladies of the Evening). Le reve de Leonor Fini (The Dream of Leonor Fini) was produced the following year and appeared at the Royal Ballet as well as the Paris Ballet.
The artist resided in France, both in Paris and the south, till her death in 1996. As many as twenty-three cats at a time accompanied her on her journeys and were her constant companions at home. Cat and sphinx imagery predominates much of her strongest work in the thirties, forties and sixties (Egyptian symbols of dignity and power). Eventually she settled with two men, one mostly a friend, the other mostly a lover, Stanislao Lepri, a diplomat turned highly successful painter, and Constanine Jelenski, "Kot," a celebrated Polish poet and writer who produced much writing on Fini, as well as a definitive study of Hans Bellmer amongst others.
Fini never officially joined the Surrealists and never married, but did produce work displayed at many Surrealist exhibitions, including her introduction to America in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Arts Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. There followed in 1937 a two person show with Max Ernst at the famous Julien Levy Gallery. Julien Levy was the preeminent gallery for Surrealist work in New York at the time.
Nonetheless, Fini was highly successful on four continents, including traveling museum retrospectives in Europe and Japan. Her work hangs in many of the world's foremost museums, and was included in three major shows in the last two years alone in the northeast (the Peggy Guggenheim Centennial, "Mirror Images" at the Liszt Center at M.I.T., and "Two Private Eyes" at the Guggenheim). Her volatile personality and tendency to "bite the hands that fed her" offended many American scholars, museum curators and art dealers, leading to lesser exposure in American venues (until her death) than in European ones.
An accomplished draftsman, watercolorist and painter, Fini was successful in virtually all two-dimensional media. The Weinstein Gallery collection will initially include oils, watercolors and pen and ink drawings.