Couples of women, Leonor Fini, Lithographs

Couples of women
Leonor Fini
Lithographs
Signed
Justified in EA

Dim: 35 x 26 cm

Dim frame: 53 x 44 cm

Leonor Fini (1908-1996)
She began painting at a very young age, first admiring the painters of the Quattrocento, then the Mannerists of the 16th century, whose languid graces already fascinated her, as well as the romantic symbolism of Caspar Friedrich David. She studied in Trieste and then in Milan. From 1933, settling in Paris, she participated in the activities of the surrealist group, as well as in London, then in 1938 in New York, Zurich and Brussels.
Having a taste for brocade and pen and a passion for masks, she was always drawn to the stage and gave some of the best of her work for theater and ballet but also for cinema.
She participated in the exhibition Le Surréalisme à Londres en 36 at the Burlington Gallery, but also in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before exhibiting there alone with Eluard and Chricio in the preface to her catalogue. A retrospective of her work was organised in 1986 at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.
Her works are materially nourished by the classical tradition, which is often the case for the surrealists, required, according to the precepts of André Breton, to give photographs of dreams. Her painting successively transposed silhouettes of adolescent girls, fantastic landscapes, bald women, germinations in an almost abstract style, again characters but always marked by strangeness. As for what these works express, the desire to refer to the fantastic is obvious, the recourse to morbid eroticism can sometimes seem forced; what perhaps makes it its main quality is the truly troubled climate, created by the old-fashioned beauty of a tried and tested technique combined with the ambiguity of the subjects treated. The strange seduction of a young naked ephebe wrapped in fur is accentuated by being represented with the religiosity of ancient techniques.
In the 1970s she painted the series Jeux de Vertige, about which she wrote: "In these games the important thing is the loss of consciousness, the happy shipwreck of oneself. The back and forth of a swing begins with euphoria and laughter to become absence and vertigo, hence the difficulty of stopping it: the attraction of the void".
Leonor Fini's work is indisputably linked to surrealism. "When Fini paints a hat, she paints it like Bonnard or she rediscovers those mysteriously incandescent tones that Redon found only in pastel, and the girls become simple pedestals for burning bushes" Robert Malville.

Ref: 3W7UW3TEXX