The Metamorphoses of Leonor Fini

Since the great rediscovery of Leonor Fini (Buenos Aires, 1907 - Paris, 1996), a meticulous and enthusiastic process undoubtedly motivated by the artist's questioning of gender roles and established social models, no exhibition has examined her influence on theatre. This aspect is addressed in the last room of the "Leonor Fini" exhibition at the Palazzo Reale from February 26 to June 22.

Given the role that masking and transformation have played in the artist's journey, including her human journey, we would have suggested a central position. In addition to an important selection of paintings, some of which have never been seen in Italy, the two curators, Tere Arcq and Carlos Martín, have selected two costumes and numerous sketches from the La Scala Theatre and the Paris Opera, evidence of an obviously mercenary and perhaps necessary – but in our opinion too frequent – activity. It also extends to the cinema, and in particular to the films of Federico Fellini, not to mention being a real passion and, in any case, a fundamental field of research into the artist's penchant for disguise.

These inclinations can be traced to Trieste from Leonor's earliest age: her mother, Malvina Braun Dubich, on the run from a despotic husband, made her wear male clothes to foil the numerous attempts at kidnapping; she herself developed her own ‘theatrical self’ in adolescence, starting a performative experimentation based on cross-dressing both in her daily outings and at costume balls and in photo shoots; her unforgettable appearance in 1951 at Carlos de Beistegui's ‘ball of the century’ in Venice, dressed as a black angel with wings attached to her dress. In fact, they led to intense and consistent work as a costume designer. Documents and images recently discovered thanks to a doctoral thesis carried out at the University of Viterbo and the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre confirm her first theatre collaboration was in Rome, not yet an ’open city’, in 1944, for the debut of Luigi Pirandello's drama All'uscita (At the Exit), and in the donation by Elsa de Giorgi of the previously unpublished sketches of Prosper Mérimée's Carmen, in the production by the Magnani-Ninchi company at the Teatro Quirino.

Perhaps even more than her paintings and illustrations for fashion, relatively scarce despite her collaboration with Cristóbal Balenciaga and her well-known friendship with Elsa Schiaparelli, who lent her clothes and for whom she designed the bottle for the perfume ‘Shocking’, Fini's theatrical production is in fact invaluable in defining the activity of this enchanting and elusive artist. She was also fuelled by a deliberately mysterious personal and media aura. The press, especially the Italian press, called her ‘Italian Fury’, ‘Black Angel’, and ‘Black Priestess’, demonstrating how often the figure and her frequent social appearances were emphasised more than her work as an artist.

Although she herself determined in total autonomy her way of being a woman and an artist – at a very young age, she portrayed victims of violent death in a morgue with the complicity of a guardian (‘children must see beautiful things’, she told him) and organised intimate birthday parties in a deconsecrated monastery overlooking the sea, in Cap Corse – few definitions better explain the luminous trait of her work than the verses that Elsa Morante dedicated to her in the 1952 poetic text ‘Nella Torre di San Lorenzo’, named after the painter's refuge in Anzio: “Then comes Leonor. The windows become light, the cobwebs precious curtains of clouds and stars, the dry branches lit up like torches, and the evening is grand, because Leonor (as I have told her a thousand times and as I will never tire of telling her) embodies two graces: childhood and majesty.”

And it is precisely this, the childlike trait, the gaze at once innocent and mischievous, that characterises the costumes of Domenico Cimarosa's Credulo, the last performance of the eclectic triptych of the ‘Prima’ at La Scala on December 26, 1951, directed by Giorgio Strehler. As the precious little book Leonor Fini alla Scala, written by costume historian Vittoria Crespi Morbio in 2005 and one of the very few existing texts on the artist's theatrical work, says, the programme opened with Giovanni Paisiello's La serva padrona and continued with Luigi Cherubini's L'osteria portoghese, in a rather sustained confrontation also for Fini with Mario Pompei and Ebe Colciaghi under the direction of Nicola Benois.

The substantial La Scala loan to the exhibition includes, the sets and all the first parts of Credulo, from Astrolabio to Tiburno and Don Cartapazio and of course Norina, sketched with a light and brilliant hand on a black background, whose precious costume is also on display; the sketches of the famous Ratto dal serraglio from the same season, directed by Jonel Perlea with Maria Callas in the role of Constanza; the delightful illustrations for Les demoiselles de la nuit, with music by Jean Françaix and choreography by Roland Petit, presented at the Paris Marigny on 21 May 1948, with prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn (who, detesting Fini, stubbornly refused to wear the mask designed for her until it was substantially modified to a delicate little nose and a moustache), and then on 14 December 1963 at the Teatro alla Scala, in the interpretation of Carla Fracci and a profusion of cat-characters that had delighted the artist, who loved felines – to the point that experts, in evaluating the authenticity of her work, scrutinise her canvases in search of inevitable hairs trapped in the paint.

The costume of Credulo on display, a revision of the robe à l'anglaise in the Ancien Régime colours so loved at the time the opera was composed as well as in the 1950s (pistachio green, powder pink, sky blue), with a double row of roses in the form of sourcils de hanneton at the point of attachment of the bodice, was worn by Franca Duval, who played Norina, and is a testament to the artist's ability to give form to the ephemeral dimension of her ideas, memories and mnemonic sensations. The cats, the sphinxes, the winged females, the flower-women, the angels and the witches, the medieval ladies and the amazons, the defenceless males and the guardians represent in fact expressions of the pictorial awareness of her imagination at least as much as her theatrical experience.

This is also evident in the exhibition in the laminated and pleated fabric costume of Régine Crespin, who played Elisabeth in Tannhäuser directed by Jean-Louis Barrault and staged at the Paris Opera in 1963 to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner (Fini often confessed her fascination for fabrics and the ‘convolutions’ of sheets and clothes, observed in the ‘penumbra of her room' and how, like many other artists, from Klimt to Matisse, she was a keen collector of fabrics).

Two years earlier, in April 1961, Leonor Fini had dressed the two stars of the moment, Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, in Peccato che sia una sgualdrina, a kind of 17th-century Arialda that Luchino Visconti had staged at the Théâtre de Paris, emphasising the melancholic side of the actress. In 1971, she gave up costume design to devote herself entirely to painting, surrounded by a sulphurous fame fuelled by her illustrations of the works of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Sade. Shortly before, she had once again given in to Fellini, a well-known lover of female attributes such as cat-like women, for a small role in Satyricon. Images of her can still be found online: an attentive face, deep-set rings accentuated by her make-up and messy curls. The director holds a mask over her face. Christian Democratic Italy has never loved her.

 

Fabiana Giacomotti
A specialist in French literature, Fabiana has managed periodicals and newspapers, published essays in Italy and abroad, and founded a master’s degree at La Sapienza University, where she taught for two decades. She writes for Il Foglio, where she edits the insert Il Foglio della Moda and hosts a show for Rai Italia. She has curated costume and fashion exhibitions for major Italian museums.
Translation by Alexa Ahern