Leonor Fini

[Marietta:] Have you seen Leonor Fini’s illustrations for Histoire d’O?  ‘Illustrations’ is hardly the word—they’re more like a visual echo of the text, dark-coloured washes over lithographed pen-and-ink drawings.

I do like Fini’s eroticism, though.

But not realistic in what sense? It’s obvious that Fini’s painting does not refer to any form of nature. Instead, it exalts subjectivity and desire, fantasy and culture. (Come to think of it, what would constitute realistic art? An art based on a belief in a coherent world that the artist would calmly set out to copy?) The work of Leonor Fini says this: No more than for the individual, reality does not coincide with itself. Its appearance is insufficient—it is an apparition of uncertain meaning. The visible is haunted by the invisible. There is no world sealed in upon itself in the certainty of its identity, but rather a ceaseless becoming that effects transmutations. What art explores is this process of change.

The angels, sphinxes, vampires, furies and sleepwalkers that pass through the lunar kingdoms of Fini’s imagination are all demons—their nature is intermediate between human and divine. Thus, closer to both gods and beasts, they surpass humans. And since they do not belong to humanity, they can show that humanity does not belong to itself: it is but a fiction by which man reassures himself, gives himself recognizable contours. Fini’s creatures are survivors of another time and place; in embodying the unknown, they incarnate the mystery of existence.

In all Leonor Fini’s paintings, passage is the recurring theme. There is no rupture, only continuity, contiguity, a generalized contagion—one time to another, one place to another, one being to another. ‘Other’, indeed, is often the adjective that specifies (without ever defining) the subject of a Fini painting, as in The Other Side and The Window of the Other Summer. The unity of Leonor Fini’s work, then, the common thread running through its diversity, is the theme of becoming. It nourishes a vital reverie, is based on a metaphysical background drawn from alchemy, and accounts for a poetics of nostalgia in which absence is not opposed to presence.

Apparently dissimilar themes—sleep, travel— can be seen as variants of the principle of becoming. In sleep we leave the order of the daytime world and abandon ourselves to another dimension; we become indifferent to time and space, interdiction and contradiction. For Fini, sleep is fascinating because it gives access to a world that is as ‘realistic’, as full and autonomous, as the daytime world: we inhabit the night.

As for travel, in changing places the passenger is, in a sense, only fulfilling his destiny; his wandering is but the outcome of his condition: an exile. Indeed, the livable place is not the one where we are but the one we are travelling to: it is not the destination, but the journey itself.

Beyond what might have set them in opposition to each other (as movement and stasis are opposed to each other), travel and sleep intersect. Their encounter intensifies, for example, the mysterious beauty of Travellers at Rest. What do we know of sleep, outside of what we believe we snatch of it upon awakening? Is it not an impossible experience? If truth be told, we know nothing of it that is not derived from wakefulness. Absorbed in the contemplation of sleeping faces and bodies, at once present and absent, we observe how the sleepers seal up within themselves this enigmatic contradiction. Note how the colours effect a fusion between the characters and the world that suggests a surrender to the night: existence is but ashen clarity, sidereal dust.

This theme appears very early in Fini’s painting, where surrender to sleep comes across as a sweet but vulnerable voluptuousness, as in Chthonian Divinity Watching Over a Young Man’s Sleep.

As for the train series, it gives expression to the paradox of the still movement of travelling sleepers, carried away in their immobility within the enclosed carriage.

In the portfolio Passengers: Thirty Faces by Leonor Fini (1992), many of the faces are asleep (or at least their eyes are closed). Though eighteen years distant from Faces for Délie: Twelve Lithographs by Leonor Fini (1974), they have the same faraway, forsaken expression. A partial effacement highlights the fragility of an existence destined to fade away—in sleep, the temptation of nothingness is already inherent.

The creative gesture, leaving traces of itself, making itself visible as a material act, recalls both the natural phenomena whose genesis it seems to imitate and the art which discerns a latent meaning in the phenomena. These semblances of undersea springs, of froth, fog and clouds are no longer quite the forms of nature since they are already the expression of a face. ‘Imaginary portraits’, not copies, these faces poetically realize the essence of the image that Plato defined as ‘the intermingling of being and non-being’.

Also from 1938 are two paintings of young women in armour up to their breasts, which seem to have been studies for La Chambre noire of 1939.

Autoritratto con Chimera (Self-portrait with Chimera, 1939) shows the artist with an abundance of long black hair and wearing a dress but with the wings and tail of a bird, standing beside a hybrid creature with the body of a lion, the upper torso of a nude woman, extended wings, and the head of a cat. This extraordinary painting of Leonor as a deity, half-animal and half-human, which has some of the shock of an Ernst collage, includes a forerunner of her characteristic sphinxes. She herself chose the word ‘ceremony’ to describe these and many later works: ‘The “ceremonies” are chosen actions where disorder, ugliness, incoherence are rejected, abolished.’

She often spoke of the need for a sense of decorum that balanced what was experienced with what was felt: ‘The decorum must be right; it will be if it supports the eroticism. If one experiences this sensation, that proves that it is correctly carrying out its connecting role.’

In 1968 Fini painted The Blind Ones: two almost-naked women making love on the floor, eyes closed, mouths open, in a paroxysm of desire. The woman underneath, who seems older, holds her partner in a tight grip. The pallor of the two women suggests a medieval scene of Death and the Maiden.

In The Botany Lesson, a naked woman uses an enlarged cross-section of a flower to teach a strange hybrid creature [or just a girl] the similarities between the primeval beauty of the female sexual anatomy and that of the structure of a flower.

In Kinderstube, a young girl crouches down and sees a lizard in a hand mirror on the floor, directly above which stands a girl in a transparent shift with her legs apart. The lizard clearly symbolizes the girl’s vulva, and this symbolism is continued in the tulip decorations on the carpet. Through the door comes an old woman in a wedding dress bearing a bridal bouquet. The sexual significance of this image was discussed by the critic Claude-Frédérique Sammer: ‘The little halo of the mirror is in itself a concentration of all the painting’s obscenity and force. It personifies juvenile provocation, welds an alliance between the two girls and creates for the viewer a potential anxiety through this uneasy contemplation of the female body. This scene manages to express with delicacy and discretion all the transgression contained within the limits of a private place.’