Artist Leonor Fini challenged our notions of the boundary between life and art

When I was younger, I thought being an artist was glamorous. That it would give me exclusive access not necessarily to a club, walled off with curtains and security guards, but a specific energy with its own forcefield, one where indulgence in pleasure was possible, where decadence was in abundance, where caricatures could be embraced as reality, where everyday life always looked like something that could be set on a stage. Maybe I thought all of this because I grew up in Tokyo as a queer girl. Regardless, the idea that being an artist was not just a career but a life that came with its own imaginary world, felt very real. 

Reality or fantasy? The life of Leonor Fini

Exposed stockings over a tilted leg with a mask of a goddess half-covering her face, framed by a long coat; a painting of a woman in white, behind her like an afterthought. In black and white. A striped blouse, maybe a poncho or a blanket in stripes below chunky earrings, lipstick, and hair blown back from her face; painting a canvas with a brush in her right hand, palette in her left, as she sits on an elegant chair with masks attached to the walls behind her. Also in black and white. Braided hat on top of hair pulled back, with curly bangs, the kind of shirt and dress worn by farmers centuries ago but in fabric they never could have afforded, chin in her right hand, pupils looking to the side, in the corner of a house surrounded by what look like costume renderings from the countless performances she designed. This too, in black and white. All three of those are photographs of Leonor Fini standing by her art that can be found today on Google Images, if you type them into a search bar. 

I learned about Fini only recently, an Argentinian artist born in Buenos Aires who moved to Italy with her mother when she was less than 2 years old. Her father, a devout Catholic, refused to give her mother a divorce and at 18 months, Fini fled to Italy with her mother. The custody battle of her as a child often involved dramatic escapades, where her mother would flee from one city to another while dressing Fini as a boy. She moved to Milan at 17 years old, and within a year exhibited one of her paintings in a gallery, which was soon followed by a slew of commissions from wealthy patrons. She moved to Paris at the age of 24, in 1931. Relatively quickly, she became friends with many Surrealist artists including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Over the course of her career as an artist, anchored by paintings often of witches, werewolves, sphinxes—always featuring women or nonbinary subjects—she also worked as a costume designer of plays, operas, films; wrote novels and illustrated others. She also painted portraits of many artists, including but not limited to: Jean Genet, Alida Valli, and Anna Magnani. Her friends included some of the most notorious artists of the 20th century: Alberto Moravia, Jean Cocteau, and Fabrizio Clerici. Her creative zeal is best represented by the plot of her first novel, “Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus,” which is primarily based on the incestuous sexual relationship between a cat-boy and his mother that includes a short section detailing how witches learn to fly on broomsticks. Perhaps most famous for illustrating the erotic novel “Histoire d’O” written by French author Anne Desclos (under the pen name Pauline Réage), Fini spent much of her adult life living in an apartment with two partners, surrounded by cats. 

The more I learn about her, the more her reality resembles a fantasy, a calcifying image of how I always imagined artists to be like when I was 7 years old, lying on my stomach in a bunk bed, flipping through history books in search of the names of artists with my gender. Whenever I would come across one, they seemed to know things I didn’t: the smell of oil paints, the touch of velvet, the taste of rum, the echoes of a Gregorian chant in a tunnel, the look of burgundy lipstick on a mouth, earnest and ironic all at once. Leonor Fini, in every photograph of her I land on, seems to know all of them simultaneously, as if she’d discovered their secret. 

Life or art? Where excess lives between the two

I’m switching gears from privacy and its constraints, but thinking in tandem with recent ruminations on what’s offered by blurring the boundaries between life and art. What does it mean to live a life where it exists also as an imaginary of itself? Surely, what nurtures it most is the introduction of new ways of being, new emotions, habits, structures; in other words, an excess of art in order for it to bleed into life. Georges Bataille (translated by Mary Dalwood) in his seminal work “Erotism,” writes, “Excess leads to the moment when transcendent pleasure is no longer confined to the senses, when what is felt through the senses is negligible and thought, the mental mechanism that rules pleasure, takes over the whole being.” 

Usually, desire feels like something that floats around in the air, waiting to be caught. I have an active fantasy life, so I often feel as if whatever’s happening there is sufficient. Enough. Dreamy. The issue with a busy fantasy life is that there’s no evidence of it. Perhaps Bataille means that building a life on more than inherited norms, even if initially it feels like a performance or fantasy, if lived with long enough can take on the architecture of a new reality, eventually becoming the everyday. 

Pictures of Fini on the internet frequently show her in riotous clothes, posing on elegant pieces of furniture, and only occasionally next to her own paintings, the form of art she’s most known for. As if within her life, she was a caricature of an artist. 

But she also was an artist, someone dynamic and fluid and creative and curious, a disciplined investigator and scribe of her own imagination. The present, and the memory-making of the past into her future, took the form of an interlocking strand of cohabitation. As if her life was taking place within her art, her art within her life; a life she built so that it would feel like art. Or maybe, so that it would look like art. But really, what is the difference between the two?

Surrealist or not? Maybe something more.

According to art historian Tere Arcq, “Sometimes, Leonor Fini has sort of been put in a box of the eroticism in her paintings and how free she was in terms of sexuality. But she was much more than that.” As opposed to being categorized in terms of her engagement with the erotic, her defining feature as an artist was in fact that she was excluded from being a Surrealist. André Breton, the so-called founder of Surrealism, declared in 1929, “the problem of woman is the most marvellous and disturbing problem in all the world.” Essentially, women were to exist only as muses, not as artists in their own right. Most of the men who were recognized as Surrealist artists in their lifetimes, all of whom Fini worked in tandem with, portrayed women as sexual objects to be consumed by men, for the pleasure of men. Many of Fini’s paintings are much less explicitly sexual than the other artists in her milieu. Rather, her works are characterized by her engagement with the aesthetics of the divine feminine and the weird, a combination of her embrace of gender fluidity, adoration for animals, and celebration of reality as a fragmented collection of dreamscapes. 

She is one of the most notorious, as well as prolific, multi-hyphenates of the last century who molded her life according to her own creed: a dissident, an inventor, a performer, a designer, not a second-rate artist deemed “erotic” for the sake of categorizing her as other. 

In her lecture “Leonor Fini’s Witches,” Anna Watz translates this quote of Fini’s from Xavière Gauthier’s book on her work:

I have always thought that women are treated badly and unfairly. I rebelled against the feminine condition from a very, very young age, and I still navigate in relation to this revolt. For me, women are independent and not submissive. But I also see that there is great confusion in this area. I hate the word equality. There is no such thing. Women are not equal. I often find that in wanting to be equal to men, women behave very modestly; in wanting to imitate men who, let’s not forget, carry an outdated civilization on their backs, they only end up giving them praise. [ … ] Why should women get mixed up in what is nothing more than a perpetuation of masculine institutions? Women should be proud to invent other “forms of greatness,” other distinctions, or, even better, to refuse them, to be authentic to themselves and above all so independent that they no longer need them.

Fini was not living a life in search of male approval, in search of being included within the boy’s club of Surrealism. Neither was her life particularly outlandish; it was simply a reflection of her idiosyncrasies. While many men in positions of power such as Breton were determined to exclude women from receiving institutional recognition, many women designed their lives in order to increase proximity to pleasure, to liberation, to self-determination. Many contemporary critics and scholars have attempted to distinguish women artists of the last century as independent or revolutionary by emphasizing their sexual independence as if their autonomy over their bodies was unusual. While this may be well-intentioned, it reifies an argument that history moves in a linear direction, that we are always on the path from regression towards liberation. This is of course not the case.

Anyone alive in 2024 can recognize that we are living in nowhere near the most progressive moment for women in world; bodily autonomy, for trans folks, for nonbinary folks, for cis women, is increasingly being curtailed by the intrusion of a patriarchal state. In any case, regardless of their subject matter (whether about their domestic, erotic, communal, religious, or economic lives), women artists from the past, like all artists across time, make work in line with the events of their own lives and the imaginaries present within it. 

Art as self-definition

Joan Didion famously begins her title essay of “The White Album” by writing, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Not its opening sentence, but the part of the essay that’s always stuck with me more comes slightly later, on the bottom of that same page: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” She here is offering a possibility for a life where meaning-making is dependent less on what happens to us, but what we make happen because of our choices.

When I was younger, I thought being an artist was glamorous. That it would give me exclusive access not necessarily to a club, walled off with curtains and security guards, but a specific energy with its own forcefield; where everyday life always looked like something that would be set on a stage. Now, I know that stages aren’t always decorated with elaborate sets, life is sometimes at its most transcendent when simple. Unlike Didion’s perspective that writers often aspire to craft narrative lines in response to life events, I’ve sometimes aspired to tainting the events, the ones thought of as part of life, into ones less defined by actions and more by feeling. In this way, I try to tempt the narrative line to follow an emotional trajectory rather than a structural one, regardless of the roadblocks it encounters along the way. Fini might agree with me, that life can become an entity to be molded in line with our own desires; something that fits us like a leather catsuit, rather than a loose sweatshirt full of holes.

Featured image: Autoportrait of scorpion, Leonor Fini,
Oil on canvas, 31⅝ × 23½ in. (80.3 × 59.8 cm), 1938.