angel of anatomy

Leonor Fini, The Angel of Anatomy, 1949. Private collection. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image via The New York Times.

Joseph Guichard Duverney and Jacques-Fabien Gautier-d’Agoty, Muscles of the Back, 1746. Wellcome Collection via https://wellcomecollection.org/works/yec7bmwu.

Let me preface this by saying Leonor Fini rejected being labelled a Surrealist because she believed (correctly) that André Breton was a misogynist. Her work extends beyond the remit of paint including book illustration, costume and set design. Living with her was once described by a household assistant as “a little bit of prison and a lot of theatre”. At one point she had 23 Persian cats. She is, undoubtedly a bad bitch, but I digress.

Fini painted The Angel of Anatomy in 1949. It depicts a full-length portrait of an ashen-haired, winged figure. In some kind of macabre burlesque act, mauve drapery drops away to reveal muscle and bone. Her painting is thought to be based on Gautier-d’Agoty’s engraving Muscles of the Back which depicts a woman twisting away from the viewer, her back flayed. Fini’s figure instead returns a steady gaze, defiantly exposing their inner-most form.

Fini wasn’t a big fan of gender norms, nor the limiting representations of women in Surrealist art (ur options: monstrous feminine or adoring girl). She reportedly enjoyed skeletons for their androgyny — once freed of flesh, they pose little reference to their gender, presenting a transgression of societal boundaries.

Although somewhat of a recluse, Fini made fleeting, and often shocking appearances at formal events, dressed in costumes of her own design. She frequently wore masks, in part for their theatricality, but more so, she felt they were more true than her biological face. Fini’s Angel of Anatomy is a kind of mask - a character of sorts wryly dropping the cloth to reveal their true self. Fini enacts a death of the body, she peels away the skin to allow transgression, liminality and freedom beyond the grips of gender and death.

P.S. Whatever you do, don’t look too closely at that left arm in Fini’s painting because bones just shouldn’t bend like that.