Full Description
Italian-Argentine artist Leonor Fini (1907-1996) can be seen as the original artist-celebrity; her self-mythologization was promulgated by some of the 20th century's most prominent photographers, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Dora Maar.
Exploring her self-fashioning and dressing-up practices in light of recent theories of performativity, this book highlights how Fini's extension of artistic creative practices, from painted artworks to her self-creation through costumes, masks and fashion, allowed her to become a living artwork to be created and recreated on daily basis. Applying a multisensory methodology, the book explores Fini's personal theatricality, photographic self-portraits and self-transformative, genderbending, transgressive dressing-up games in relation to surrealist practices, showcasing the hybrid identities that made up Fini's overall character.
In three thematic sections - exploring her theatrical performances at balls, her self-fashioning in photographic and painted portraits, and her becoming-other through dressing-up - the book charts the artist's personal and creative development, the interaction between her paintings and self-creation and her increasing self-empowerment through dressing-up. With over 100 visually-striking colour illustrations, the book analyses and highlights some of Fini's most outstanding performances together with her paintings and self-portraits. Kollnitz argues that the way these identities were represented in the celebrity press compromised Fini's critical reception as an artist, and how more broadly patriarchal objectification of fashionable women artists has the potential to jeopardise their professional agency. In contrast, this book showcases Fini's self-fashioning as a tool of artistic and personal empowerment as well as an intrinsic part of her art production. In doing so, the book gives voice to the significance of self-mythologisation for artists to whom identity is fluid and plural.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Becoming Leonor Fini - an Introduction
Part One: Enter: Leonor Fini
2. Theatricality between Art and Life
3. Spellbinding - Bal du Panache 1947
4. The Power and Beauty of Animals - Bal de la Voilette and Bal des Oiseaux 1948
5. Sublime and Divine - Bal des Masques et Dominos XVIII Siècle 1951
Part Two: The Art of Self-Fashioning
6. Performing the Artist
7. Self-Portrait with Scorpion - Leonor Fini, Agnolo Bronzino, Titian
8. Fashioning the Self - Leonor Fini in photographs 1920s-1930s
9. Surrealist Self-Imagination
10. The Artist as Artwork - Leonor Fini in Costume 1940s-1950s
11. Staging Magnificence - Eddy Brofferio's Portraits in Le Livre de Leonor Fini
Part Three: Becoming Other
12. Displacing the Self
13. Masks and Masquerades
14. Woman in Transgression
15. Becoming Sovereign
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
