Overlooked artists

Today's subject, painted over yesterday's leftover substrate, is a young Leonor Fini, photos of whom I found on the internet without knowing who she was. Turns out she was a powerful surrealist artist who painted some really interesting stuff. She also designed costumes and sets for the Paris Opera, and dressed herself as dramatically as if she were a part of one of those productions; she wrote three novels in later life, as well as illustrating many works by the great authors and poets, including Poe, Baudelaire, and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She painted many portraits of the famous and socially prominent, her last being a portrait of Paul and Linda McCartney, which was rejected by their agent as being "too precise and too sad."

She was born in Buenos Aires in 1907 of Argentinian/Italian ancestry, but spent much of her life and career in Paris. When she was a teenager she had an eye disease that forced her to wear bandages on both eyes; when she recovered, she decided she would become an artist and moved to Milan at age 17 and then to Paris in her 20s, in pursuit of that.

She had many lovers, for some of whom she served as a muse, and steadfastly avoided marriage and motherhood, living for much of her life in Paris and in the Loire Valley with two lovers (one artist, one writer), two assistants (who also acted as concierge and housekeeper), and up to 23 Persian cats. She actively worked through her art to subvert the roles imposed upon women by society, abandoning images of women who were fragile and innocent in favor of female figures who couldn't be categorized or sexually defined.

Despite her successes and exhibitions, Salvador Dali dismissed her work as "better than most, perhaps, but creativity is in the testicles." (One wonders if Dali's was the body on the table depicted by her in "The Anatomy Lesson." All the girls and women are looking at him with a degree of disgust surely deserved by that remark!)

Leonor Fini died in 1996. Despite her prolific career, the Centre Pompidou Collection du Musee d'art Moderne in Paris contains just one painting by Fini, a portrait from 1932. It also contains a dozen photographic portraits of her by Man Ray. This is a final slap in the face for yet another marvelous artist who happened to be a woman. It makes me want to paint her over and over, to extend the memory of her life and career!

As I did with yesterday's portrait, I let the background show through this, and dictate most of the colors I used. (I think her eyes were probably brown in life.) "Leonor Fini"—Posca pen and acrylic paints on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.