In retrospect, Leonor Fini recalls how: “Train journeys seem boring nowadays, but in the past I found them dramatic. They could be scenes of adventures, of unexpected meetings. They seemed to me the perfect setting for erotic situations to develop” (quoted in Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, New York, 2009, p. 223). It was precisely on account of the latent potential held within this ambiguity which drew Fini to the subject of the namesake train with a ceaseless ability to render it anew. Executed in 1975, Le Train is a paradigmatic example of her mastery over the image type, rendered with all of the luminous treatment of paint and suffused with all of the erotic and symbolic potency that came to establish her style as singular within the broader Surrealist milieu.

Born in Buenos Aires, Fini spent the majority of her formative years with her mother’s family in Trieste, a cosmopolitan, multilingual city in the northeast of Italy; from an early age, she decided her path was to become an artist. In the absence of a formal artistic training, however, Fini found inspiration and instruction in the work of the Italian Mannerists, an influence which is readily felt in the present composition. Disinterested in the classicizing insistence on balance, proportion and ideal beauty, Fini instead resonated with the Mannerist’s elegant distortion of the human figure, their highly stylized use of color and their indulgence in the surface quality of textiles (see figs. 1 and 2). She likewise distilled from them an aspiration towards high pictorial drama and the disappearance of the artist’s hand, both of which are radiantly achieved in the present canvas: “I wanted the paintings to be like exhalations that would give no clue as to how they came about: paint strokes almost pointilist, invisible; material that could never be described only aroused.”

It is perhaps also from the Mannerists that Fini came to appreciate the erotic in terms of the material as much as she did the physical. In the absence of physical contact between the two women, the sensually rendered fabric comes to at once absorb and communicate the erotic potential latent within the scene. The heavy, rich brocade of the window curtains, coupled with the luscious pale green velvet adorning the seats contributes to an environment that is viscerally tactile in its furnishings. The emphasis therefore falls on the sense of touch, which is heightened by the unconcealed placement of their almost iridescent hands.

In the same vein, the two women seem to be linked by way of cost.mes , as the blue dress of the woman at right echoes the silk ribbon tying back the hair on the woman at left, and vice versa with her own dress and the other’s headband. As in her earlier Les Aveugles, the chiffon dresses seem to at once adhere to and dissolve against the figure, and flesh reciprocally takes on the hue of the fabric that drapes around it (see fig. 3). With the necklines of both dresses having already fallen to expose the two womens’ breasts, Fini transforms fabric into an extension of the feminine, and implicitly the sexual body.

The present motif—the encounter or the union of two women within the circumscribed limits of a train compartment—made its first appearance in Fini's oeuvre with a remarkable series of oils begun in 1965. In each work, as in the present, two women sit opposite each other with the window or blind drawn closed behind them. While in some of her train scenes, as in her most explicit, Le Long du chemin, she renders overt the relationship between two women, while in the present work it remains entirely implicit (see fig. 4). The composition as such is a near-exact reinterpretation of Augustus Leopold Eggs’ The Travelling Companions (see fig. 5). Fini expounds on the excit.mes nt aroused by the nineteenth century precedent: “She does not know what she will do next, whether she will kill the other or make love to her” (quoted in Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, New York, 2009, p. 222). Inflected with her reading of a train as a space wrought with sexual possibility, Fini has made the repressed Victorian sexuality overt. Stripped of the layers of dress and the adjunct accessories—books, flowers, scenery—Le Train becomes an uninhibited investigation into the relationship between the female body. Taking from Egg, Fini creates a narrative, or rather enacts a confrontation, by way of mere compositional arrangement.

The train had long served as a specter or backdrop for an investigation into the human condition and psyche, but often through the lens of solitary contemplation. In Edward Hopper’s Chair Car, the space between the dispersed passengers, made palpable by the unnerving wash of sunlight flooding through the window, comes to represent a disconnect only made apparent by the intimacy of the shared surroundings (see fig. 6). Where enclosure should bring them together, it instead prompts each of the four figures to recede further into their respective bodies. In Le Train, the compartment itself becomes a character within the scene. The two women, locked in each other's gaze, wear expressions that belie any conclusive reading of their emotions—oscillating between disgust, intrigue, scorn and perhaps a semblance of fear—but which undeniably signal an embodied mutual recognition. It is the orientation of the seats, and their close proximity, which forces the women to address each other. The viewer’s imagination, like the train itself, therefore becomes the enabler or activator of a fantasy waiting to take place.

While in Le Train, Fini quite intentionally removes any suggestion of whether the train as pictured is in motion, or indication of where it is going to or coming from, the implied notion of a journey, particularly of one with exclusively female protagonists, was a central idiom within the oeuvres of her female Surrealist contemporaries. Though Fini never explicitly aligned with the Surrealist movement, she figured prominently within the innermost circles of their Parisian cohort, and developed a close friendship and affinity with Leonora Carrington in particular. It is precisely on account of her ability to render a dream with the precision of reality, and reality with the mysticism of a dream that her work resonated so deeply with the Surrealist project. As Yves Bonnefoy so aptly eloquates in his catalogue essay for Fini's 1963 exhibition at Iolas Gallery in New York, in Fini's work: "there is the world of vision, and that of sensation, the labyrinth of infinity and the shore of the absolute, creating out of both a single reality" (quoted in Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, New York, 2007, p. 225).