‹ Collection ‘Gli artisti dello spettacolo alla Scala’ ›
Leonor Fini at La Scala
by Vittoria Crespi Morbio.
Essay by Vittoria Crespi Morbio, La gatta dagli occhi di febbre / The Cat with Feverish Eyes.
Appendices: biographical notice; catalogue of the works; chronology of stage designs by Richard Overstreet.
Collection «Performing Artists at La Scala».
Amici della Scala – Umberto Allemandi & C., Turin 2005.
Italian edition, pp.74.
An extremely beautiful woman with a magnetic, dangerous charm, Leonor Fini (Buenos Aires 1908–Paris 1996) strides into 20th-century art, regal, solitary and sulky like a pedigreed cat, and cat-women will be the most frequent presence in the surreal, imaginative bestiary of her painting beside bird-women and flower-women.
Introduced to New York by De Chirico when she was eighteen, worshipped by Éluard, photographed in a thousand situations revealing her delightful egocentrism, Leonor is a painter with an unmistakable style: her dreams and erotic imagination swept like a thrill over the stage of La Scala between 1951 and 1963 with the music of Cimarosa, Mozart and Jean Françaix.