Carl Van Vechten took this classic 1936 photograph of Argentine surrealist painter Leonor Fini, she of the experimental hats and ever-present cats. From Fini’s 1996 obituary in the Independent: “In the 17th century Leonor Fini would have been burnt as a witch. Surrounded by cats, and with feline eyes herself, she exuded what her one-time lover Max Ernst described as ‘Italian fury, scandalous elegance, caprice and passion.’ In photographs you would take her for beautiful in the manner of Bianca Jagger but, according to the American art dealer Julian Levy, she was not a beauty as such, in that ‘Her parts did not fit well together: head of a lioness, mind of a man, bust of a woman, torso of a child, grace of an angel, discourse of the Devil . . .’
Levy confirms my belief that if she had been born in the age of the extra teat and the familiar, this lady was for burning. “Her allure,” he says, “was an ability to dominate her misfitted parts so that they merged into whatever shape her fantasy wished to present from one moment to the next.” You can almost hear the faggots crackle.
Leonor Fini was of mixed Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Slavic blood, a formidable genetic cocktail. She was born in Buenos Aires in 1908 but grew up in Trieste. Her formal education was, as might be imagined given her independent and imperious temperament, fragmentary, but she had the run of her uncle’s large library in Milan and also travelled widely in Italy and Europe visiting all the museums and taking in such then unfashionable painters as the Mannerists, a school later reflected in her own work. In reproduction she was to add Beardsley, the German Romantics and the British Pre-Raphaelites – all evidence of a Surrealist eye.
Her facility was precocious. By the time she was 17 she was already painting commissioned portraits. It was however in 1936 when she moved to Paris and became friendly with Ernst, the Eluards, Brauner and others, that she began to paint Surrealist images and to draw close to the movement. Close but not of. Like her greater contemporary Frida Kahlo, Fini refused to bend her knee before Andre Breton, and declined to accept the iconic role of child-woman or to accept his belief in l’amour fou, the monogamist obsession with one person as opposed to bisexual narcissism. She did however exhibit with the group as a kind of fellow traveller.”
