Leonor Fini, the Nearly Forgotten Sphinx of the 20th-Century Parisian Avant Garde

A cross-dressing, bohemian feminist who was practically synonymous with the Parisian avant-garde of the early and mid-20th century, Leonor Fini was just as celebrated (and frequently disdained) for her infamously outré habits as she was for her distinctive works of art.

A lifelong nonconformist, vanguard of feminism, and an unabashed libertine, Fini was once one of the most photographed and talked about women in the world; today, she has all but fallen into obsolescence. San Francisco’s Weinstein Gallery recently aimed to remedy this neglect through a comprehensive exhibition of works by the Argentinian-born, Italian-raised modernist. “Leonor Fini – Réalisme Irréel” spotlights paintings and works on paper that span six decades of artistic output, bolstered by a clutch of intimate photographs, writings, and personal correspondence culled from the Leonor Fini Archives in Paris, some of which have not seen the light of day for many years. These archival documents buttress the importance of Fini’s life and work within the context of twentieth century art, revealing a Rolodex of friends and contacts that reads like a laundry list of the most exceptional and influential creative players of that century: Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Federicco Fellini, René Magritte, and Man Ray are among them, as are writers such as Paul Éluard and Georges Batailles, both of whom especially championed Fini’s more boundary-pushing work. 

It was Cocteau who characterized Fini’s paintings as working within the realm of “réalisme irréel,” where the natural is rendered supernatural and vice versa. It’s an apt qualification of Fini’s work, which often features unsettling imagery. Irregular and irrational proportions dominate Fini’s canvases, such as those found in the recurrent sphinx motif in her unorthodox portraits of grossly misshapen women or in her hyperreal visual narratives that stage highly eroticized scenes of dominant women and passive men. 

In paintings such as La prison de Zigriphine (1975) and La Perle (1978), it is easy to see how Fini, who was largely self-taught, was influenced by her studies of Flemish Masters like Hieronymous Bosch, whose work dished up grotesque and macabre allegories of excess. In others, such as Dans la Tour (1952) and Operation I (1939), one senses a tip of the hat to Italian Mannerists such as Bronzino, while still others, such as Voyageurs au repos (1978) and Le Train (1975), exhibit an affinity to the intensely detailed and richly colored works pioneered by the Pre-Raphaelites, whose paintings Fini also ardently studied. And yet, despite these comparisons, Fini’s work, which ultimately resists neat categorization, remains decidedly singular, just like the artist herself.