FRIEZE MASTERS
9 – 13 October 2024
The Regent’s Park
London, UK
Leonor Fini & Stanislao Lepri
Booth F14
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of surrealism, Galerie Minsky is delighted to present a selection of paintings by the surrealist artist couple Leonor Fini (1907 – 1996) and Stanislao Lepri (1905 – 1980).
Leonor Fini and Stanislao Lepri met in 1941, lived together in Paris with the writer Constantin Jelenski from the 1950s onwards, and never separated until Lepri’s passing away. A self-portrait with Stanislao Lepri, 1942-43 by Leonor Fini will be exceptionally exhibited before leaving for Milan, Italy on the occasion of Leonor Fini’s largest retrospective at the Palazzo Reale in February 2025. Rarely seen pieces such as La Leçon de Vol, 1978 by Stanislao Lepri will also be shown along with his surrealist bestiary. Whilst Fini has greatly influenced Lepri’s painting, he was more than just her student and, in many ways, simultaneously developed a richly diverse, sometimes charming, sometimes disturbing surrealist or oneiric world within which he perfectly accompanied Leonor Fini’s surrealist universe.Their technique however, merged towards the same goal, achieving a completely neat finish and smooth painting, highlighting their unique and personal vision of their own world. Lepri’s world concentrated on oneiric and satirical elements, using society’s hierarchies and structures applied to both humans and animals together. Fini’s attached more importance to developing her own persona through herself and female figures. Animals in Fini’s paintings enhance men’s and women’s features, whereas Lepri most often presents humankind alike animals. Both artists were greatly influenced by the Italian Renaissance, especially mannerism, but also by Flemish masters, and have thus distinguished themselves from surrealism by embracing and rediscovering this heritage.
Self-portrait with Stanislao Lepri, 1942-43
Oil on canvas
46 x 38 cm
This piece testifies to Leonor Fini’s maestria as it brings together several emblematic elements of her art: the autobiographical aspect since it is a self-portrait with her friend and lover Stanislao Lepri, the sphinge through which Leonor Fini envisioned herself with a greater sense of self, as well as features taken from Mannerist portraiture.
Roméo et Juliette, 1979
Oil on canvas
40,64 x 33 cm
Catalogue raisonné N° 923, ref. no. 0844
Book illustration represents an important part of Leonor Fini’s activity, which had fed her practice as a painter, inspiring her for new characters, scenes and motifs. She chose most of these illustrated books (or “beaux-livres”) “from literary admirations“, creating illustrations that “show the same diversity as the rest of her work” (Michel Nuridsany, Catalogue of the retrospective exhibition in Japan, 2005). The authors she loved most were undoubtedly Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare.
At the end of the 1970s, the French writer Yves Florenne emphasized the great originality of Leonor Fini’s paintings while highlighting their affinity with his own rewriting of Shakespeare. In the book they made together in 1979, La tragédie de Roméo et Juliette, enriched with twelve illustrations by the artist, Juliet became the true hero of the tragedy, prominent, strong, led by “her living eros” (Yves Florenne, La Nouvelle Revue des Deux Mondes, 1979). Leonor Fini created a “great nocturne crossed by a dark fire” right up to the final image, where the lovers are close to disappearing. This series, with “a surrealism that would be hers alone“, seems to come “from afar, and not only from the depths of dreams: perhaps from the depths of painting (…) also, with less evidence, — from elsewhere“. A very unique Romeo and Juliet, in which “the power of dreams, the erotic mysticism, are ever more present“.
Les Baigneuses – The Bathers, 1972
Oil on canvas
73 x 118 cm
Catalogue raisonné N°793, ref. no. 0775
This very bright painting, full of transparencies, belongs to the period when Leonor Fini referred to the myth of Narcissus (Narcisse incomparable, 1971) and to the character of Ophelia in Hamlet (Ophélie, 1963 ; La Toilette inutile, 1964). Through exquisite compositions, she explored the themes of beauty — often associated with coquetry and languor —, death and vanity.
Mise en garde, 1980-2
Oil on paper mounted on canvas
46 x 37,5 cm
Catalogue raisonné N°961, ref. no. 0873
Mise en garde is part of a series of paintings created by Leonor Fini in preparation for her first major retrospective in Paris, called “Les petites enseignes pour la nuit”. This ensemble can be compared with the beautiful illustrations that the artist made one year earlier for Hugo Von Hoffmaansthal’s “Tale of the 672nd Night”, featuring characters with translucent drapery and turbans.
The atmosphere emanating from these scenes “is that of a half-dream and a precise vision deeply intertwined” (Gustaw Herling, Journal écrit la nuit, L’Arpenteur-Gallimard).
“From the very light period, I moved on to more veiled paintings, close to penumbra and shadow. A kind of night that often comes out alive in sharp colors. In the history of painting, I’ve always been attracted to Pompeian night, the night of the Rhenish Gothics, Mannerist night, Caravagesque night, the night of German Romantics” (Leonor Fini, Catalogue of the retrospective in Japan).
L’apprentissage, 1977
Oil on canvas
100 x 81 cm
L’apprentissage, which features a child unwrapping a human-shaped package, is one of the very striking confirmations of the artist’s ability to introduce an element of grace into strange to disturbing compositions. Despite the weirdness of the situation, the almost bare room in which the scene takes place, bathed in a delicate light, gives a silent beauty to it. This painting appears to be a deepening of what Leonor Fini already noticed while discovering the works of Stanislao Lepri’s teenage years, both “bizarre” and “spiritual” as she put it, now strengthened by greater technical mastery than ever before.
Nebbia, 1982
Oil on canvas
100 x 81 cm
Catalogue raisonné N°970, ref. no. 0872
Bambini in Periferia, 1960
Oil on canvas
90 x 60 cm
Bambini in periferia shows a fringe area where Stanislao Lepri’s world can freely unfurl, with all its “poetic truth that ignores the laws of logic, the constraints of space and time, provoking unusual encounters, oddities (…) infiltrated by a subtle concern and sometimes a secret cruelty”. The fact that the painting features two children is eloquent, if we compare, as Jean-Claude Dedieu does, this poetic truth to the perception of a child at play (Stanislao Lepri, Catalogue de l’exposition à la Mairie du VI arrondissement, 1990).
Stanislao Lepri probably sought realism in his animal representations more than Leonor Fini, aiming for external resemblance to existing birds, frogs, pigs and to his “totemic animals: the rhinoceros and the cat” (Constantin Jelenski). He would then place them in unusual contexts, dress them in human clothing or vary considerably their size like in Bambini in periferia.
Sphinges, 1973
Oil on paper mounted on canvas
71 x 54 cm
Within the incredibly extensive body of work Leonor Fini has created, only a very few pieces are characterized by the most iconic symbol, dear to the artist and to her own representation as such, the sphinge. Painted in the 70s, these two sphinges decorated with jewels stand out for their great subtlety.
La Leçon de vol, 1978
Oil on canvas
100 x 73 cm
The bird in La Leçon de vol (The Flying Lesson) embodies the point of view that Stanislao Lepri’s paintings often adopt, that of an overhanging gaze, following the “perspectives that a demiurge might have on his creation” (Jean-Claude Dedieu, in Stanislao Lepri, Catalogue de l’exposition à la Mairie du VI arrondissement, 1990).
Portrait of Lady Diana Cooper, 1941
Oil on canvas
35 x 28 cm
In Monte Carlo, from 1941 onwards, portraiture was one of Leonor Fini’s regular activities. Lady Diana Cooper, the glamorous icon of the 20th century who became a viscountess through her marriage to Alfred Duff Cooper, is one of the numerous models from that time.
In the commissioned portraits, but also in the portraits of friends and the self-portraits from the 1940s, Leonor Fini alternated between elegant finery and nudity decorated with foliage and branches. As the artist represented Lady Diana Cooper, she covered her hair and bare shoulders with laurels.
This choice recalls, among other pictorial traditions, a tradition in Venetian Renaissance painting which consisted in decorating courtesans with this highly symbolic plant, giving them a mythologized existence or leading them to personify abstract qualities (Giorgione’s Laura).
