An Evening with Leonor Fini

We invite you to screenings of the films Where is Leonor? and 8½ , in which we will take a look at the works of Leonor Fini, which bring costumes and props to the fore in order to reveal the theatricality of femininity – performance, masks, and drag as camouflage necessary for survival in a patriarchal world.

An evening with Leonor Fini

Fini was born in Buenos Aires in 1907, but her imagination was formed in Trieste, a cosmopolitan hinge between Central Europe and the Mediterranean. She left formal schooling early, self-educating through privilege and curiosity, and by her twenties was already exhibiting among the 900. Once she arrived in Paris in the 1930s, she became a legend almost instantly. She refused André Breton’s authority, joining circles rather than groups, always preferring affinity to allegiance.

Giampaolo Penco’s short documentary opens with a question: where is Leonor?, fitting for an artist who cultivated enigma as a mode of self-possession. Filmed partly inside Fini’s Paris home, the documentary threads together a 1991 interview with Fini and recollections from those who knew her in Trieste. Moving through rooms dense with carefully preserved traces of her life, the film portrays an artist who staged her environment as meticulously as her canvases. Penco’s portrait affirms what her friends always said: that she lived as she painted – theatrically, sensually, defiantly.

Although painting remained at the core of her artistic output, by the mid-1940s she had become involved in stage and opera costume design, creating for productions ranging from Pirandello to Mozart. This theatrical instinct – the joy of metamorphosis expressed through masks, drapery, silhouettes – is visible everywhere in her work and in her life. Eddy Brofferio’s photographs of her flamboyant self-presentations show her in sculptural capes, pleated robes, feathered headpieces, and patterned garments that transform the body into a figure that is part diva, part creature of myth.

This context matters when considering Fini’s proximity to Federico Fellini and the lingering question of the extent of her involvement in 8½. Photographs of the two together attest to their friendship. The film credits do not include her name – perhaps she offered impressions, sketches, or inspirations – yet a shared theatrical imaginary between the creations captured by Brofferio’s camera and several fantasy sequences in 8½ is indisputable. Feathers whose function is to present the female body as artifice operate within 8½ as expressions of femininity as spectacle, something deliberately constructed. Fini’s own visual style reflects this logic closely, with her headdresses functioning as both crown and mask, and when paired with pleated cloaks and robes they give the wearer a creaturely silhouette, often unfolding like wings, obscuring the body’s boundaries, making it seem infinite and godly. In 8½ sculpted volume and architectural drapery function in a similar manner, suggesting female figures that are constructed for similar effect, rather than merely dressed. At the same time, the use of fabrics that behave like second skin both in 8½ and in Fini’s work signal a creative affinity by articulating a vulnerability that underlines performance. 

Without accessible records of Fini’s contribution to Fellini’s film it is unclear to what extent she experimented with her own costume ideas while observing or advising the (credited) costume designer for the film, Piero Gherardi, whether Fellini or Gherardi brought her onto the project because she already – with significant experience in costume and set design for opera and the theatre – was an expert on translating a metamorphic femininity into fabric that the film sought to crystallise. Perhaps all three artists drew from the same atmosphere of early 1960s Rome and Paris, where theatre, cinema, painting, and fashion flowed freely across disciplines. 

The archival silence around Fini’s involvement is itself instructive. As Saidiya Hartman reminds us in Venus in Two Acts, the archive is never neutral: it preserves by omission as much as by record, often obscuring the labour of women while amplifying the authority of men. The fact that Piero Gherardi won an Academy Award for costume design on 8½ while any contributions Fini made remain uncredited exemplifies this imbalance – a reminder of how easily women’s creative work is absorbed into men’s achievements and lost to official memory. 

[Aleksandra Jeglińska]