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Leonor Fini, Princesses, Circa 1970
€2,900Bid from €2,850
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ProfessionalSaint-Didier, FranceOn Whoppah since January 2022 • 8 sales
Product description
Rare hand-signed and numbered print by the surrealist artist Leonor Fini, whose work is currently enjoying increasing interest in the context of the rediscovery of women artists. This rare original lithograph depicts two bare-chested women in an orientalist atmosphere evoking the Arabian Nights. Dimensions: 73 × 53 cm. Good overall condition for its age, with some slight marks on the paper that should become barely visible once the work is framed.
Leonor Fini is considered one of the most important women artists of the mid-20th century, alongside Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, and Dorothea Tanning, most of whom she knew personally. Her career, which spanned nearly six decades, covered many fields: painting, graphic arts, book illustration, object design — notably the famous bust-shaped perfume bottle created for Elsa Schiaparelli's Shocking — as well as the creation of sets and costumes for theater, ballet, opera, and cinema.
In a particularly vivid and well-documented biography, author Peter Webb powerfully reconstructs Leonor Fini's provocative art, her extraordinary personal life, and the vibrant world of the avant-garde in which she evolved.
Born in Buenos Aires on August 30, 1907, to Italian and Argentinian parents, Leonor Fini grew up in Trieste, Italy, raised by her mother Malvina, an independent woman with a strong character. She was largely self-taught: she notably studied anatomy by observing cadavers at the local morgue and assimilated the principles of composition and technique of old masters through books and museums.
Her first painting experiences in Trieste led her to Milan, where she participated in her first group exhibition in 1929, and then to Paris in 1931. Her lively personality and taste for flamboyant outfits quickly earned her a unique place on the Parisian art scene. She soon became associated with several major figures of surrealism, including Paul Éluard, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Max Ernst, who was also her lover for a time. The only surrealist she claimed she couldn't stand was André Breton, due to his misogyny. Although she often exhibited with the surrealists, she never considered herself a surrealist.
The American dealer Julien Levy, impressed by her painting and seduced by her eccentricity, invited her to New York in 1936. There, she participated in a joint exhibition with Max Ernst and met many artists associated with American surrealism, including Joseph Cornell and Pavel Tchelitchew. Her work was also presented in the historic MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, alongside Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy.
In 1939, in Paris, she organized an exhibition of surrealist furniture for her childhood friend Leo Castelli, on the occasion of the opening of his first gallery. The introductory texts for her exhibition catalogs were notably written by De Chirico, Ernst, and Jean Cocteau.
One of the central themes of Fini's work is the complexity of gender relations, and more particularly the opposition between a dominant female figure and a passive, often androgynous man. In many of her strongest works, the woman takes the form of a sphinx, sometimes endowed with the artist's own features.
Leonor Fini was also an accomplished portraitist. Among her models were Stanislao Lepri and Constantin Jelenski — two of her long-time companions, with whom she lived simultaneously, surrounded by many cats — as well as her friend the writer Jean Genet, actresses Brigitte Bardot, María Félix, Maria Casarès, Anna Magnani, Alida Valli, and Suzanne Flon, the dancer Margot Fonteyn, the filmmaker Luchino Visconti, artists Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington, as well as socialites Francesca Ruspoli and Hélène Rochas.
Her interest in stage and cinema was undoubtedly linked to her taste for extravagant masks, sophisticated costumes, and theatrical and fantastic universes. She created sets, costumes, and posters for many prestigious productions, notably for the Opéra de Paris and the Metropolitan Opera, for George Balanchine's Le Palais de Cristal, now known as Symphony in C, Jean Anouilh's Les Demoiselles de la Nuit, Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet, Wagner's Tannhäuser, Racine's Bérénice, Jean Genet's Les Bonnes and Le Balcon, Federico Fellini's Huit et Demi, as well as John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death, Anjelica Huston's first film.
Talented, glamorous, and controversial, Leonor Fini herself was a source of inspiration for many artists in her circle. She was frequently photographed or evoked by poets and photographers such as Charles Henri Ford, Paul Éluard, Georges Hugnet, Erwin Blumenfeld, Dora Maar, Man Ray, George Platt Lynes, Lee Miller, Horst P. Horst, Brassaï, Cecil Beaton, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Movement & Style: Surrealism
Specifications
ConditionVery goodColorsBlue, Green, Multi Color, Orange, PinkMaterialPaperNumber of items1OrientationLandscapeArt sizeMediumHeight53 cmWidth73 cmSigns of usageusagesign-corneredge-wear
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About this seller
ProfessionalSaint-Didier, FranceOn Whoppah since January 2022 • 8 sales