Becoming Leonor Fini

An analysis of surrealist artist Leonor Fini’s self-fashioning and dressing-up practices that explores broader questions of gender and identity performance, creating and styling the self and the woman artist's role.

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.