Leonor Fini

(Buenos Aires 1907 – Paris 1996)

La Mémoire infidèle, 1979

Oil on canvas, 73 x 100

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art “Filippo de Pisis,” inv. 787

Educated in the cultured Central European milieu of Trieste, frequented by James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba, Leonor Fini moved in 1929 to Milan where she entered the orbit of Novecento Italiano promoted by Margherita Sarfatti and became a student of Achille Funi.

From the early 1930s he began to stay in Paris, frequenting the circle of Italiens de Paris, from Giorgio de Chirico to Filippo de Pisis. Contact with Picasso and with exponents of Surrealism, such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí and Paul Eluard, is fundamental to the elaboration of a very personal pictorial language. After the war, after a Roman interlude, he settled permanently in the French capital, imposing himself on the artistic and social scene with his eccentric and charismatic personality. In addition to her pictorial production, animated by visionary Surrealist figurations, she devoted herself to illustration, set design and the production of theatrical costumes, but she also loved to disguise herself with clothes of her own design made by famous designers.

In 1983 Palazzo dei Diamanti dedicated a major exhibition to her following which the artist donated two works from 1979, La Mémoire infidèle e Le crépuscule du matin. These paintings mark the evolution of Fini’s work from the mysterious chromatic mixtures of the 1950s-1960s to a precious and polished painting that draws on the universe of art history. However, the compositional order that reigns in the production of the 1970s conveys disturbing meanings connected to the universe of memory. La Mémoire infidèle frames an eighteenth-century dandy-looking mannequin gazing at a barely recognizable painting. The picture within the picture is an actual work by the artist, Le crépuscule du matin, which in turn was inspired by the fresco with nymphs painted by Bernardo Luini, around 1514, at Villa Pelucca near Monza and preserved at Brera. The memory of the Renaissance work studied in his youth, however, acquires the dreamlike accent of a nocturnal vision. Leonor Fini thus interposes in double filter to her own “memory”: she intends thus to emphasize the distance that separates us irreparably from any most shining memory and the seductive as much as illusory nature of any form of representation.