"It's hard to define talent. Where does it come from?
I think it's the product of a type of revolt.
A strong need to make your mark."

—Leonor Fini

From an early age Fini strove to make her mark through her paintings and drawings. As a teenager she took on numerous high-level portrait commissions. She moved briefly to Milan, where she was accepted into the circle of Metaphysical painters that included Giorgio de Chirico. Fini's success multiplied in Paris, where she immediately became a sensation as both an artist and a personality.

The imagery of her paintings was loosely based on dreams, and this, paired with her staunch rejection of convention, led her to be associated with the Surrealist group. She never, however, sacrificed her independence to them and abhorred their misogynist views. Nonetheless she did show often with the group both in Paris and abroad. Most notably her work was included in the nowfamous 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Coinciding with the MoMA presentation was a solo show of Fini's work at the Julien Levy Gallery, the most important gallery for Surrealism in New York. The accompanying brochure featured texts by both Paul Éluard and de Chirico.

The pinnacle of her prewar work in Paris culminated in an exhibition she organized for her childhood friend Leo Castelli, in his first gallery, Galerie Drouin, in May 1939. Soon after, like many of the artists in Paris, Fini left the city, traveling first to the Southwest of France, then to Monte Carlo, and eventually to Rome. As most of her colleagues decamped to the United States, Fini stayed in Europe. In retrospect, this decision seems deeply symbolic, suggesting the artistic path she would follow for the rest of her life. It doesn't seem a coincidence that it was during this time that she met one of her lifetime loves, Stanislao Lepri. In some ways these facts illuminate the same thing: her life and art would be defined by personal, individual relationships, not some larger, more vague relationship to the "art world."

Fini's reputation as an artist flourished when she returned to Paris, and her popularity and influence soared over the next decades.The list of people she knew, collaborated with, or who were influenced by her is in itself a remarkable inventory of the thinkers and artists of the twentieth century: Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Joseph Cornell, Dora Maar, Anna Magnani,Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Federico Fellini, John Huston, Georges Bataille, Erich Neumann—writers, actors, artists, diplomats, filmmakers, scholars. But as history has borne out, the center of the art world shifted during the war to the United States. One has only to take the example of Leo Castelli, the great dealer of artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, to see the path very clearly. Of the hundreds of solo exhibitions of Fini's work in her lifetime, only about half a dozen were in the U.S.

So while Fini's European reputation was confirmed, it did not carry over to this country.The art world here instead embraced the male heroicism of abstract expressionism, and subsequent movements of Pop art and minimalism, whose ranks were largely made up of male artists. Fini never tried to be anything other than she was—an independent woman who was also one of the most visionary painters of her time.The art world did not then and, to some degree, still does not know where to put her.This was compounded by the rise of blockbuster exhibitions and financially driven markets of the 1980s and early 90s, which coincided with some of Fini's most personal and difficult work of her career. Fini, herself, for better or worse, never accepted the label of "woman artist," and in at least one notable example she sabotaged an attempt by a curator at a NewYork museum to show her work in the context of an exhibition of female Surrealist painters.To the curator's request, Fini replied that she was not interested in "harem shows."

None of this should in any way indicate that Fini was not successful as an artist. She was by every account. She always lived off her art and participated in exhibitions every year of her life from 1935 on. Over fifty books were published on her artwork, which included not only painting and drawing, but theater design, costume design for film and stage, and prints. She even authored several books. Her works and her company were sought out throughout her life by important collectors and artists alike. Given all this, the larger point is only that Fini should have the reputation of Dalí or Ernst, her exact contemporaries. She does not yet. Leonor Fini passed away in 1996, ever a force and considerably well respected, but never having received her full due as the one of the great artists of her time.

There can be no doubt that in the decade or so since Fini's death the art world has become more inclusive, and that the history of twentieth-century art is understood to be far more pluralistic than earlier critics may have conceived it to be. In this context Fini's art is being re-revealed through the work of scholars,museums, and collectors around the world. Its beginnings might be traced to 1985 when, as Fini was preparing for her first major solo museum show at the Musée du Luxembourg, American art historian Whitney Chadwick published her groundbreaking work, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. This book started the push to finally include women in the historical canon of Surrealism despite their omission at the time by André Breton. In time, Fini's work also began appearing in major museum exhibitions around the world, exhibitions like Surrealism: Desire Unbound at the Tate and Metropolitan in 2001; La révolution surréaliste at the Pompidou in 2002; a solo exhibition the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokyo which traveled throughout Japan in 2005; and Surreal Things, an enormously successful show organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and which traveled to Bilbao, Rotterdam, and Toronto from 2007 to 2009. In 2008 Fini's famous salon, in which she had made art and hosted so many people over the years, was permanently reinstalled in the Hospice Saint-Roche museum, in Issoudun, France.An extensive retrospective, Leonor Fini: L'Italien de Paris, just closed at the Museo Revoltella in Trieste, Italy, her home city. Perhaps most importantly for American audiences, the first English-language monograph about her, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini by Peter Webb, has just been published by Vendome Press in New York.

I cannot tell you how honored I am to be part of this long-due recognition of the talent of Leonor Fini.When Weinstein Gallery hosted an exhibition of her works in 2001, I did not think that body of work could ever be gathered again by a private gallery. I am very pleased to admit that I was wrong.Weinstein Gallery presents here a collection of some of her most important works from throughout her career. From her early, exuberant works to the precise and fine-wrought works of her mid-career to the provocative, narrative-styled works of her later decades, each shows the fierce independent vision of one of the true creative forces of the twentieth century.We have named this exhibition after one of her late paintings, Une grande curiosité, a great curiosity, which is expressive of both Fini's motivation and the place she holds in the minds of those who try without success to pin her down.

Rowland Weinstein
Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco
with Jasmine Moorhead, chief researcher