< 'She was a pure creator.' The art world rediscovers Surrealist painter Leonor Fini

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An overlooked female artist is starting to get her due. Nearly 30 years after her death, surrealist painter Leonor Fini's captivating and often gender-bending images are attracting renewed appreciation. NPR's Greg Allen reports that Fini is one of the featured artists at the annual Art Basel fair, underway this week in Miami.

GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Leonor Fini outlived most of her contemporaries - artists like Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte - dying in 1996 at 89 years old. Although she was part of the movement, gallery owner Rowland Weinstein says she wasn't just a surrealist painter.

ROWLAND WEINSTEIN: She was a pure creator. She continually changed. In that essence, I think she's like Picasso. She changes, grows and changes and grows. She loved theater design, costume design, and she was kind of a genius in all of them.

ALLEN: One mark that this is Fini's moment is that you can find her paintings at the fair in Miami this week, where many in the art world are gathered. Weinstein's San Francisco gallery has joined with a Parisian art dealer to mount a show of some of her most important work. Born in Argentina, Fini moved to Italy with her mother as a child and learned to draw by sketching cadavers at the local morgue. Although she had no formal training, Fini became an accomplished artist, first in Italy and then Paris, where she became intimate - artistically and sometimes romantically - with surrealist artists including Ernst and Dali. She was part of the first major surrealist exhibitions. But Weinstein says the founder of the movement, French writer Andre Breton, didn't accept her as one of them.

WEINSTEIN: If he said you were a surrealist, you were. If he didn't say you were a surrealist, you could paint surrealistically, but you weren't a surrealist. And he would not have a woman be a surrealist. In his view, women were muses.

ALLEN: Fini was a flamboyant, eccentric and glamorous part of the Paris art scene, appearing at events in costume or dressed like a man. As an artist, she was productive over a remarkable six decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, she became immersed in stage and costume design for theater and opera companies, even contributing costumes for Federico Fellini's film "8 1/2."

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ARLETTE SOUHAMI: I work all my life for Leonor.

ALLEN: Paris gallery owner Arlette Souhami first met Leonor Fini in 1978. She found her overwhelming, opinionated and fascinating. Souhami's friend and interpreter, Victor Picou, picks up the story.

VICTOR PICOU: When she met Arlette, Leonor said, I don't like women in general. And Arlette said, neither do I. And she said, OK, we're going to get along right.

ALLEN: Souhami became Fini's art dealer who worked with her for the rest of the painter's life. It was an intense relationship. Fini called her five times a day. For a show in the 1980s, Souhami recalls combing Paris bakeries to find 20 white cakes that surrounded the artist, dressed also in white, in a video and photo shoot. Weinstein says because of her beauty and charisma, Fini fascinated the other artists and photographers in her circle.

WEINSTEIN: There was a time when the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction was a piece by Henri Cartier-Bresson, which was a woman floating naked in the water from the neck down. And it's stunningly beautiful. And nobody knew this at the time, but it's Leonor Fini.

ALLEN: In some ways, Souhami says, Fini's personal life was as fantastic as her surrealist art. For much of her life, she lived in a relationship with two men who shared her Paris home.

SOUHAMI: (Speaking French).

PICOU: She was free. She was the most extraordinary artist woman Arlette met. But she was also neither man or woman. She was androgynous.

ALLEN: Souhami says Fini's progressive - radical at the time - approach to gender identity stemmed from her childhood. Fini said her mother disguised her as a boy in her early years in an effort to evade attempts by her father to kidnap her in a custody dispute.

SOUHAMI: (Speaking French).

PICOU: And you can see that in her painting because you can see men that look like women and women that look like men in her paintings, so it's very fluid.

ALLEN: One of the paintings in the Fini exhibition in Miami shows the artist fully dressed, leading her semi-naked male lover. Weinstein says it's a role reversal from paintings that typically show a naked woman reclining before a fully clad man. Weinstein says that was revolutionary.

WEINSTEIN: She presents herself very strong, very powerful. Clearly, the dominant person in the painting is Leonor Fini.

ALLEN: Interest in Fini has risen in recent years among collectors and museums. One of her paintings sold last year for $2.3 million. Art historian Tere Arcq says as with other women artists, like Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington, some of the fascination with Fini's personal life runs the risk of obscuring her achievements as an artist.

TERE ARCQ: Sometimes Leonor Fini has been sort of put in a box of the eroticism in her paintings and how free she was in terms of sexuality, but she was much more than that.

ALLEN: There are two major Fini exhibitions now in the works. Arcq is curating one next year that will open in Milan and travel to other cities. The other, in 2026, opens in Frankfurt, Germany.

Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.

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