An Act of Creativity: Leonor Fini and Dressing Up
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An act of creativity: Leonor Fini and dressing up The position of Leonor Fini (1907-1996) within art history is rather paradoxical; she is both visible and unknown, linked to a major aesthetic movement, but did not identify herself as being part of it. More often than not, when I mention her name I receive blank stares, yet her paintings appear in important collections across the globe, her work is frequently exhibited, and she appears in major publications on the women artists associated with the Surrealist movement. 1 As we look back over Fini’s life and career we encounter a problem: art history relies on labels to talk about artists: movements, periods, media, and so on. Some scholarship on Fini (my own included) continues to label her as a Surrealist, despite the fact she did not view herself as one.2 How are we to talk about an artist who eschews categorisation? Not only did Fini reject being labelled as a Surrealist, this rejection also extends to feminism and the label of ‘woman’ artist. Though her works frequently feature powerful women and express complex female identities that cannot be reduced to a single, traditional feminine stereotype, she did not accept a feminist identity. While Fini understood and sympathized with the feminist aim of standing up to gender inequality, she felt that such a label robbed her of her much-valued autonomy, and that placing women on a separate pedestal to men, as the early feminists did, only emphasised the gulf between genders. Nor was she alone amongst her female peers in feeling this way.3 She also protected her independence in more tangible, social terms, as she eschewed not only the conventional routes of marriage and motherhood, but also of monogamy. Though the major loves of her life, the Italian artist and diplomat Stanislao Lepri, and the Polish economist, soldier, and intellectual Constantin (Kot) Jelenski, both lived with her simultaneously in a communal arrangement, she also took additional lovers.4 Fini’s rejection of fixed labels is perhaps connected to this disavowal of social conventions and 1 categories of Woman and femininity. To effectively assess Fini’s achievements across all areas of her oeuvre, we therefore need to breakout of traditional categories and adopt a more fluid approach. As such, the key to understanding and discussing Fini’s oeuvre in full, across all its different outlets, is the notion of transformation; an emphasis on flux, metamorphosis, and ambiguity, all of which resonate throughout Fini’s work. This essay traces the central importance of this concept for Fini by exploring her engagement with dressing up – a core catalyst for expressing the transformative. Dressing up allows one’s identity to be repeatedly made and re-made, existing in a state of flux. Fini uses her costumed body as a vehicle for artistic creation: producing characters that illuminate facets of her identity, which then reappear in her art and design.5 I will therefore look at her use of clothing, theatrical designs, and painting, and relating these to ideas Fini expressed in her own writings to create a more cohesive exploration of her work in relation to dressing up. Examples of her work from across her career will be used to demonstrate the wide-spread and continual exploration of transformation, and the specific motifs used to express this. In engaging with the transformative in her work, Fini ultimately portrays a complex notion of Woman that cannot be boiled down to simple categories. Fini was born on 30 August 1907 in Buenos Aries, Argentina. Her father was a very domineering man and Fini’s mother Malvina left him and fled home to her relatives in Trieste, Italy while Fini was still an infant. Fini grew up amongst her mother’s relatives: a cultured upper-middle-class household, they introduced Fini to art and music, but were still conservative enough to be somewhat shocked when Fini decided she wanted to be an artist herself: As soon as I began painting what was in my head, the people around me were shocked. Things acceptable to read or talk about were repugnant when they came to life.6 2 She was self-taught, studying art from an early age through reading books and visiting museums.7 In 1931, her interest in dreams and the unconscious world drew her away from the Milan art world, and into the orbit of Surrealism in Paris. Fini’s interest in liminal spaces and relationships – the point between life and death, human and animal – dovetailed neatly with André Breton’s stated aim of Surrealism: the reconciliation of opposing states.8 Similarly, in an interview Fini expanded on her attraction to Surrealism, stating that the Surrealists explored “the reverse side of things and their hidden correspondences”; something akin to her own practice, which revealed “a being inside [her]”.9 Despite her affinity with some of the core Surrealist interests, she never joined the group officially, disliking André Breton’s monopoly over the group and his prejudices. In an interview with Peter Webb she recalled: I disliked the deference with which everyone treated Breton. I hated his anti-homosexual attitudes and also his misogyny. It seemed that women were expected to keep quiet…yet I felt that I was just as good as the men…I never saw the point of being part of one group, and…I refused the label Surrealist…I preferred to walk alone.10 Nevertheless, Fini participated in key Surrealist exhibitions, including Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1936. She also organised the Surrealist Furniture exhibition in 1939 for Leo Castelli and René Drouin’s new gallery in Paris. This exhibition reveals Fini’s interest in design, which was not limited to furniture but also included illustration, commercial design, and scenography, and would continue to grow into the 1940s and beyond. However, most discussions of her work focus on her painting alone. This is perhaps understandable given that Fini often undertook these design projects for additional income and to provide a break from her painting practice, suggesting that she primarily viewed herself as a painter.11 For example, 3 she specifically refers to her designs for an unrealised ballet of 1972 as “a diversion from my painting”.12 However, these design projects frequently drew on motifs from her painting and her private life, suggesting that all areas of her output need to be considered to create a holistic analysis. The pieces shown by Fini at the Surrealist Furniture exhibition included her Anthropomorphic Wardrobe (figure 1) and Corset Chair, both of which highlight transformation. The women who flank the wardrobe doors are human-bird-plant hybrids; caught in the very act of metamorphosis as their lower halves are replaced by wings, which curl into leaves at their tips. Like many of Fini’s sphinxes, these hybrids are not one-dimensional monsters ready to pounce, but ambiguous guardians, protecting the doors while the feathered muffs over their hands possibly conceal claws, highlighting an unfixed identity.13 Similarly, the corset is captured at a liminal point in transforming from a wearable item to a piece of furniture. Its loosened laces suggest a point between being dressed and undressed, and the way in which these laces hang in arabesque sweeps, rather than dangling limply, implies the Corset Chair has come to life, transforming from inanimate to animate. Figure 1: Leonor Fini: Anthropomorphic Wardrobe, (1939), oil on canvas on wood, 86½ x 57 x 12½ inches, Rowland Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco. Image courtesy Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, photography by Nicholas Pishvanov. © Estate of Leonor Fini, 2018. While flux and transformation are themes continually explored in her work, an important aspect of this exploration for Fini is the act of dressing up; both depicted on canvas and enacted in her everyday life. She outlined the importance dressing up, writing in 1975 that: To dress up, it is the instrument by which we feel the sensation of changing dimension, species, space. It enables one to feel gigantic, to plunge into vegetation, to become an animal…To dress up, to disguise oneself is an act of creativity…It is one – or many – representations of the self…The act of disguising is a narcissism multiplied into other images 4 and it becomes its own show made all the more fascinating in that…you always know that it is still your own self behind it.14 Fini’s earliest encounter with dressing up was as a child, when her mother dressed her as a boy whenever they travelled in order to evade Fini’s father, who aggressively campaigned to regain custody of his daughter after Malvina left him.15 This episode may well have caused her to think (consciously or otherwise) that having a fixed sense of self was a dangerous thing to be avoided, and contributed further to her dismissal of identifying labels. This fear is perhaps at the root of Fini’s change in attitude towards being photographed: When I was a child, I hated being photographed. I ran away…Now I am always photographed: in costume, in disguise, in everyday dress. But I do not like snapshots, nothing is more false than the ‘natural’. It is the ‘pose’ which is revealing, and I am curious and amused to see my multiplicity – which I think I know quite well – affirmed by these images.16 As a child Fini would have had little control over the creation of her image in the photograph; as an adult she would gain much more agency in choreographing an identity; one that could not easily be fixed.17 Indeed, as an adult, dressing up became a central part of her