(via bookofjoe)

 
Via What’s the Matter with Dino?

 
Leonor Fini is one of the few women to be closely associated with the Surrealist Group, although Fini herself did not see her self as a Surrealist at all and rejected membership. Still she remained a fellow traveler of the Surrealists throughout her career, although in many ways her work—a sensuous celebration of female sexuality—tweaks the misogynistic and homophobic tendencies of movement, especially its founder Andre Breton (who was all for lesbianism). Her work has been represented in nearly every major Surrealist exhibition.

Much is made of the artist’s good looks and upfront sexuality. Fini was famously photographed naked—and clean shaven—floating in a pool by Henri Cartier-Bresson. (This photograph sold for over $300,000 in 2007). Fiercely bohemian, she also lived in not one, but two menage-a-trois relationships. When she died her obituaries were as much about famous men she’d slept with as her own career, but Fini kowtowed to no man, she lived life completely on her own terms, a feminist long before the term existed.

 
Hurry, Hurry, Hurry, My Dolls Are Waiting (1975)

It has been said of Fini, that she was a “female Dali” and in many ways this is true. The narcissistic artist was an imposing presence in any room with her beauty and flamboyant fashions. And like the Divine Dali, her art came from a place deep inside her, as she was forced to develop a inner vision during extended teenage bouts with an ocular ailment that saw her eyes bandaged shut for months at a time. When the bandages came off, she wished to document what she had been inwardly visualizing and declared herself an artist.

The self-taught Fini began to exhibit her art at the age of seventeen and she knew anyone worth knowing in Paris and internationally. She also designed clothing and ballet and opera sets. Her design for the bottle of Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume is considered iconic. She is one of the most photographed people of the 20th century and famously attended dozens of costume balls in elaborate costumes. She was always in magazines. During her lifetime she was quite a big name, although by the time of her death in 1996, she’d become a bit obscure. The French government even refused to take paintings in lieu of back taxes owed by her estate, although she was called “...the most undervalued artist of the 20th Century” by the Art Dealers Association of America.

Schiaparelli’s Shocking

A reappraisal of her work seems due and this appears to be happening with the publication of a new monograph/biography of Fini titled Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, written by her friend, art critic Peter Webb. It is an absolutely superb and beautiful volume—it’s sitting beside me as I type this—truly it’s one of the finest crafted objects I’ve seen in some time. If you’re looking for a nice coffee table book that will knock someone’s socks off for a gift, this is it. Her work is also part of the Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism show at Manchester Art Gallery until January 10, 2010.

 
Model, painter, disco diva and the absolute fiercest of the pioneering transsexuals (along with Candy Darling), Amanda Learwas born Alain Tap in Saigon, 1939. Or it could have been Paris. Or Hong Kong. The year might have been 1941, 1945 or as she now claims 1948. There is much competing information about her parents, none of it conclusive. In general, not much is known for sure about the early life of Amanda Lear and she would like to keep it that way. She claims to have been educated in Switzerland and she eventually made her way to Paris in 1959, taking the stage name Peki d’Oslo, performing as a stripper at the notorious drag bar, Le Carrousel.
 
The story goes that the gangly, yet exotic Eurasian beauty Peki had a nose job and sex change in Casablanca paid for by Salvador Dali, who frequented Le Carrousel, in 1963. Amanda, as she is now known, then makes her way to London to become a part of the swinging Chelsea set where she is rumored to have had a relationship with Rolling Stone, Brian Jones. She models for Yves St. Laurent and Paco Rabanne and is a constant muse for the Divine Dali, but her career is held back by rumors that she was born a man.
 

 
Roxy Music front man Bryan Ferry sees Lear on the runway during an Ossie Clarke fashion show and invites her to be the model for Roxy’s For Your Pleasure album cover walking a black panther on a leash. They had a fling and that image has become iconic. Lear also has a yearlong affair with David Bowie who sings Sorrow to her in his 1980 Floor Show (broadcast here on the Midnight Special in 1974). Bowie helped Lear launch her musical career and by the late 70s she had become a best selling disco singer and television personality in Europe with hits like Queen of Chinatown and I Am a Photograph. She collaborated with Eurodisco duo La Bionda (who Tara is nuts about and has posted here about them)

 
Her autobiography, My Life With Dali came out in 1985 and it begins when she would have been approximately 24 or 25 years of age. No mention is made of her life before arriving in London in 1965. When Dali biographer Ian Gibson confronted her on camera about the gender of her birth, Lear angrily—and not at all convincingly—stonewalled him. She has always vehemently denied that she was a transsexual despite it being a well-established fact. She even posed nude for Playboy and sunbathed naked on beaches to dispel the rumors. All this really proved was that she had a kickin’ bod!
 
Amanda Lear still looks amazing and continues to perform She has a thriving side career as a painter.

 
Modeling in the 60s with Patti Boyd Harrison and Karianne Muller (later a Roxy Music cover girl herself):

 
Bonus: Another incredible performance of Queen of Chinatown

Salvador Dali—or Avida Dollars if you prefer—shilling for Lanvin Chocolate in the early 70s.