Abstract
This chapter discusses the theatrical practices of the surrealist artist Leonor Fini (1907–1996) in relation to strategies of self-protection and empowerment through self-fashioning and affect on audiences. Fini theatrically staged and lived her paintings through continuously dressing-up and recreating herself in different roles as a way to experiment with what she called her own multiplicity and to liberate herself from constrictions as a woman/artist in a male dominated art world. Through spectacular self-designed costumes, masks and different ways of self-stylisation, displayed in public performances at balls or social events and in photographic portraits taken by prominent art and fashion photographers, Fini indulged in processes of self-transformation and transgression. “Becoming” animals, hybrid creatures, sorceresses and others, she staged herself as a powerful woman and artist subverting conventional gender roles and the notion of fixed identities. Interpreted through theories in theatre and performance studies as well as notions of the sublime and becoming, the case of Leonor Fini is highly relevant for discussing the interaction of performance and performativity and the merging of artistic creation and self-creation in the self-fashioning of a woman artist that performs as a powerful, sometimes terrifying subject through creating herself as a sublimely beautiful object.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Bruns, G. (2007). Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways). New Literary History, 38(4), 703–720.
Burke, E. ([1757] 1823). Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. Thomas M’Lean Haymarket.
Butler, Y. (1966). Leonor Fini, for TSR (Télévision Suisse Romande).
Colvile, G. (1991). Beauty and/Is the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini. In M. A. Caws, R. Kuenzli, & G. Raaberg (Eds.), Surrealism and Women. MIT Press.
Copjec, J. (1994). Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. MIT Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). The Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The Athlone Press.
Evans, C. (2003). Fashion at the Edge. Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness. Yale University Press.
Faucigny-Lucinge, J. L. de. (1986). Fêtes memorables, bals costumés 1922–1972. Herscher.
Fini, L., & Alvarez, J. (1975). Le Livre de Leonor Fini. La Guilde du Livre and Les Editions Clairefontaine; Vilo.
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The Transformative Power of Performance. A New Aesthetics. Routledge.
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2012). Transforming Spectators into Viri perculsi: Baroque Theatre as Machinery for Producing Affects. In P. Gillgren & M. Snickare (Eds.), Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome. Taylor & Francis.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punishment. Tavistock.
Foucault, M. (1988). In L. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault. University of Massachusetts Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin Books.
Kline, K. (1998). ‘In or Out of the Picture: Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’ in Whitney Chadwick and Dawn Ades, Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Kollnitz, A. (2017a). Die Kunst der Selbstinszenierung. Mode, Kostüm und Selbststilisierung als kreativer Ausdruck und Grenzüberschreitung in Leonor Finis Leben und Werk. In A. Ulrich, F. Weltzien, et al. (Eds.), Widerspenstiges Design. Hochschule Hannover, University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
Kollnitz, A. (2017b). The Natural is False: Posing as Leonor Fini. Vestoj: The Journal of Sartorial Matters, issue 8: On Authenticity.
Kollnitz, A. (2018). The Self as an Artwork. Fashion as Creative Expression and Performative Provocation in the Life and Work of Leonor Fini. In F. McDowell & L. Armstrong (Eds.), Fashioning Professionals: Identity and Representation at Work in the Creative Industries. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Kollnitz, A., & Weltzien, F. (2017). Subversive Selbstermächtigung. Surrealistische Modefotografie bei Leonor Fini und Wols. Zeitschrift für Fotogeschichte, Nr 143, Jg. 38, Frühling.
Levy, J. (1977). Memory of an Art Gallery. Putnam.
Mahon, A. (2013). Féminité triomphante. Surrealism, Leonor Fini and the Sphinx. Dada/Surrealism, nr 19.
Mandiargues, A. P. de. (1951). Masques de Leonor Fini. Photographies d’André Ostier. La Parade Éditions André Bonné.
Merleau-Ponty, M. ([1945] 1962). The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Negrin, L. (2016). Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Corporeal Experience of Fashion. In A. Rocamora & A. Smelik (Eds.), Thinking through Fashion. A Guide to Key Theorists. I.B. Tauris.
Overstreet, R. (2012). Exhibition catalogue Weinstein Gallery: The Sphinx’s Riddle. The Art of Leonor Fini.
Overstreet, R., & Zukerman, N. (2021). Leonor Fini. Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, vol II. Weinstein, Scheidegger & Spiess.
Webb, P. (2007). Sphinx. The Life and Art of Leonor Fini. The Vendome Press.
Zarrilli, P. (2000). Embodying the Lion’s Fury: Ambivalent Animals, Activation and Representation. Performance Research, 5(2): On Animals.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kollnitz, A. (2023). Terrifying Beauty: Theatrical Self-Performance in Leonor Fini’s Art and Life. In: Mahawatte, R., Willson, J. (eds) Dangerous Bodies. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06208-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06208-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06207-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06208-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)