"Anatomy Lesson", Leonor Fini, 1966
Anatomy Lesson
Surrealist paintings by Leonor Fini, 1966-74
The art world lost respect for surrealist Leonor Fini in the 1960s. Critics (at least the male ones) dismissed her sixties work as decorative, mere soft-core erotica under its surreal skin; not serious. I take this as code for: not male. Few men appear and none have agency. Fini said she painted the world she wanted: woman-centered.
Are they decorative soft-core porn? No question they're seductive and intended to be: lots of nudity, flowing soft shapes, pastel or floral colors. But these girls and women aren't objects, but subjects--and what they're up to isn't trivial.
In Leçon d'anatomie (The Anatomy Lesson), 1966, little girls in floral dresses and fancy hats look down calmly at a dead, naked man laid out on a table...
Only the youngest shows any distress--perhaps she hasn't yet learned not to sympathize with men, those violent, short-lived creatures.
It's hard for me not to see this as summing up Fini's experience of World War II.
In Les Étrangers (The Strangers), 1968, young women look into a goldfish bowl full of hands, knees and feet. The hats and dresses are still here, but peeling off; the five figures range from elaborately dressed to nude. Soft-core porn? With a side order of Holocaust!
Those long-handled ladles suggest cookery. Fini confirmed this was her intent in an interview with biographer Peter Webb. No need to waste all that dead meat from the previous painting...
Then we have La Peine capitale (Capital Punishment), 1969. Here the sacrifice is explicit; the goose as penis, the impending gandercide as castration. The blue-bladed knife echoes (in color and shape) that high-heeled shoe. Stiletto indeed.
Webb's biography quotes several critics; all focus on what this might mean to men, completely ignoring the inter-female dynamics here.
The knifeholder seems impatient to get on with it; the gooseholder reluctant, having second thoughts. But do their opinions matter? The naked high-heeled girl clearly dominates. Is she their role model of sexual freedom? Or directly offering sex to them, is she their reward if they cut off men? Not much of a choice, if all the dicks geese are as limp as this...
I'd read it as: guys led us to catastrophe, so forget them and turn to your sisters; even the baddest of bad girls isn't Hitler.
Kinderstube (The Nursery), 1970, tries an experiment: the same palette and treatment, but remove boys and violence entirely, so sex and power between women are foregrounded. As in Capital Punishment, one girl strips and dominates another, apparently demanding oral sex. But the kneeling girl ignores here to stare in a mirror on the floor that reflect the standing girl's vagina. Only... it's a lizard.
Up to there, it's rather Dalí. But the mirror-gazing minion isn't in the lacy frocks of previous paintings, nor nude, but in practical modern clothes. More independent? Another detail caught my eye: her hair's parted in the center in the perfect shape of a vagina, over her crown chakra. She's definitely got sex on her mind... but really thinking it over. If the old woman rushing in is traditional femininity, all floral lace and repression, and Lizard Girl is sixties acting-out or seventies selfishness... the mirror-gazer seeks a third way.
One final painting: L'Orphelin de Velletri (The Orphan of Velletri). Another uneasy, empathetic girl, this one's shocked to find a baby in a decorative glass vase.
The opposite of Kinderstube above, this one removes the sexual games, to highlight the question of sympathy with victims versus atrocity-as-usual; back to Anatomy Lesson. Who stuffs a child in a jar? In Fini's life, a whole so-called civilization did. And made beautiful glassware. And, you know, lampshades.
Anyway, Fini was a bland old has-been with nothing left to say.
SOURCE: Sphinx: the Life and Art of Leonor Fini by Peter Webb (2009), pp.235-47.
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