“Leonor Fini does not belong to those artists who, as products of their t.mes , put their stamp on it because they are the first to express what is so confusingly happening in the minds and in the sensitivities of their contemporaries. Like Fuseli, Odilon Redon, Moreau, she creates a universe that is hers alone.”
Les Stylites is a radiant example of a compositional format which Leonor Fini ceaselessly returned to throughout her oeuvre—the exploration of the intimacies and dynamics between two figures, particularly between two women. Unlike the overtly sexual relationships which characterized her works from the 1960s, the present canvas is paradigmatic of her overarching fixation with depicting women in positions of unflinching authority. Executed in 1976, a moment of maturation of both the theme and her distinct Surrealist style, Les Stylites stands as a culmination of Fini’s captivating artistic vision, and her deft ability to translate the world as she imagines it into paint.
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, where at an early age she decided her path was to become an artist. In the absence of 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 distilled from the Mannerists 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 pointillist, invisible; material that could never be described only aroused” (quoted in Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, New York, 2009, p. 215). She likewise 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 fig. 1). In the same way her Italian predecessors used bright, saturated hues to create a sense of drama and visual intrigue, color is integral to the hallucinatory quality which characterizes the present work. The two central figures are illuminated by a soft orange glow which echoes in the misty atmosphere that surrounds them. Despite her distinctly pastel palette, Fini’s tones are softened, rather than muted, in such a way that retains their iridescent, chromatic vibrancy.
The tension between the solidity of Fini’s description and the diaphanous effects of light posit the two women as caught between the physical and the ephemeral, and confers on the whole composition the distinct quality of a dream. Despite the fantastical nature of her painted realm, the serenity of the palette and the austere precision with which it is rendered likewise calls upon the stylistic precedents established during the Early Renaissance. Particularly apt comparison can be drawn to the biblical frescoes of Fra Angelico, whose characteristic use of ascetic interiors with strong architectural inflections offers the same narrative complement to his figures that Fini’s painted world does for hers.
Though Fini never explicitly aligned with the Surrealist movement, she figured prominently within the innermost circles of their Parisian cohort. 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 wrote for her 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 ibid., p. 225). Caught between the totemic formations personified in Kay Sage’s barren landscapes, and the chimerical figures who occupy Max Ernst’s whimsical interiors, the women within Les Stylites are made unique on account of their remarkable balance between figuration and imagination (see figs. 3 and 4).
Right: Fig. 4 Max Ernst, La Toilette de la mariée, 1940, Peggy Guggenheim collects ion, Venice. Art © 2024 Max Ernst / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Much of Fini’s oeuvre was devoted to the exploration of, or rather retaliation against the sexualization of women through the perspective of her female protagonists, proud and sure of their own sensual power. As in many of her compositions, the two central figures are here both posed with their heads turned to face the viewer and their eyes locked in direct gaze. The nude woman closest to the foreground stands in a disarming confrontation, rendered in a statuesque contrapposto with her palm raised as if to halt whomever approaches. In their posture, Fini engenders a somewhat paralyzing mode of viewership, as we are made to feel distinctly aware of our own observation of the women, and the reciprocal scrutiny of their gaze cast upon us. The notion of display, and of the visual consumption of the female body as it has appeared throughout art history is here reappropriated in Fini’s characteristically Surrealist inversion.
Fini’s vision of an almost exclusively female world was a central idiom within the oeuvres of her female Surrealists peers more broadly. A pantheon of towering goddesses and ethereal voyagers populate the canvases of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Fini alike (see fig. 5). But as in the present work, Fini’s femme fatales occupy spaces that evoke an alternative to our lived reality, rather than a realm which lies within a completely invented mythology. Positioned like statues atop freestanding pedestals, these two women, along with the three others further in the distance, are poised as surreal reimaginings of ancient sibyls—totems or perhaps sentinels of a world tangential to but ultimately beyond our reach. In her preface for the 1975 monograph, Le Livre de Leonor Fini, the artist herself aptly eliquates the artistic ambition she so beautifully realizes in Les Stylites: “I paint pictures that do not exist and that I would like to see. … The imagination feeds itself on images all along the way, and here are a few itineraries of my imagination” (ibid., p. 251).
