These visionary paintings aren't dreams. I've included them partly because they're some of Fini's most famous works, and are clearly related--in the second, two years after the first, Heliodora ["Gift of the Sun"] gets on a train, which, Fini said, for her meant romantic and sexual adventures.

Art critics disliked these and her other highly patterned and decorative pieces in the sixties because they were sexy and lacked the proper surreal creepiness. "Why, she's catering to popular taste! Trying to please the viewer!" To (male) critics that meant selling out. I find that absurd--other work in this period has corpses and bodyparts stuffed in jars--just painted in pretty, femme, pastel colors, with girls in floral hats as bored witnesses to male carnage. I hoped that pleased the critics more.

Fini herself said she didn't give a shit about the art world--she just wanted to paint her own sexy woman-centered world.

Heliodora, 1964

Vesper Express, 1966

Vesper Express in particular still gets me. In the first painting she was static--but here, Heliodora's swooping asymmetrical curves suggest the excitement of travel, and contrast with the train's right angles. And that drastic, simple palette, with just two color-pairs dominating: cream and black, red-orange and blue-green. Oversimplifying? Well, but it works. You might as well whine "The Great Wave oversimplifies!"

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Sphinx: the Life and Art of Leonor Fini by Peter Webb (2009), p.213 & 219.

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