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Lot Essay
At the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance, Leonor Fini agreed to meet Constantin Jeleński in Rome in 1951. As Fini told Richard Overstreet, the editor of her catalogue raisonné, the artist proposed that the two find each other in front of a painting by Fabrizio Clerici that was hanging at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni as part of the Sixth Quadrennial d’Arte. When Jeleński arrived, however, the gallery was empty save for a heady aroma of perfume. “He followed the scent's trail... until he saw a tall woman dressed in black” (R. Overstreet, “Drawn From the Past” in R. Overstreet and N. Zuckerman, op. cit., Zurich, 2021, p. 90). But when he went over to introduce himself, he was caught off guard by Fini’s astonished expression. When she regained the power of speech, she explained that the day before she had sketched a man who looked exactly like Jeleński. It was, she thought, destiny, a belief further underscored by Jeleński’s nickname. He was called Kot by his friends, which means cat in Polish, and Fini adored felines. By September of 1952, the two were living together in Fini’s apartment in Paris, and they remained a couple until Jeleński’s death in 1987.
Painted shortly after their meeting, the magisterial Dans la tour (Autoportrait avec Constantin Jeleński) depicts Fini and Jeleński strolling through a tower. The stone edifice is the Torre San Lorenzo on the Latium coast of Italy, where the two had spent the summer. This was also the setting for the short film La Torre del surreale, which narrated Fini’s working methods and included a brief glimpse of the present work.
Paintings of Fini with Jeleński are exceedingly rare, and the importance of Dans la tour within the artist’s oeuvre has been repeatedly noted by scholars. The art historian Peter Webb called Dans la tour Fini’s “most impressive painting of this period,” and went on to note that “it is an image of female power and wisdom, executed in meticulous detail” (Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, New York, 2009, p. 549). The work is featured on the cover of the collector’s and deluxe editions of Fini’s catalogue raisonné and has been requested for the artist’s 2026 retrospective at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Dans la tour was included in the 2020 exhibition Fantastic Women at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.
In Dans la tour, Jeleński, who is nude, is guided by a clothed Fini through this magical realm towards the unknown wonders that await. Such positioning was characteristic of Fini, who so often subverted contemporary gender conventions and often inserted her own image in her compositions as a means of affirming her individuality and autonomy. Fini’s women experience “a separate reality,” argues Estella Lauter. “They are in touch with forces beyond themselves in a space which lies beyond the windows, doors, and screens that figure so prominently in Fini's backgrounds” (“Leonor Fini: Preparing to Meet the Strangers of the New World” in Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 1980, p. 47). In a world that so often privileged men, Fini ensured that women were rendered with prominence and importance. By painting her own face in Dans la tour (Autoportrait avec Constantin Jeleński), she defines her image and thus control her legacy.
Here, Fini wears a long gown while a Baroque red cape is draped elegantly around Jeleński’s body. The details of their clothing have been meticulously rendered using small, painstaking brushwork. Fini had a “passion” for textiles and could pass hours looking “long and hard at the convolutions of sheets, bedspreads, and clothes in the half-light of [her] bedroom” (L. Fini, “In Her Own Words” in R. Overstreet and N. Zuckerman, op. cit., Zurich, 2021, p. 35). This attention to fabric’s material qualities aligned with the artist’s larger interest in clothing—although painting was her primary occupation, she designed sets and costumes for productions by, among others, George Balanchine, John Huston, and Federico Fellini, including the latter’s acclaimed film 8½. Fini herself was known for the extravagant outfits she wore to the costume balls that were all the rage in Paris during this period. “The only reason I went to the balls was the opportunity to dress up,” she said. “The true party for me was the preparation of my costume” (quoted in R. Grew, “Leonor Fini and Dressing UP: An Act of Creativity” in Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 40, no. 1, 2019, p. 17).
For Fini, sartorial fantasy helped her to project herself into new and otherworldly realms, a central theme within her artistic practice. Costume provided a means for transformation, be that aesthetic or psychological, and in her paintings, Fini hoped to “convey one or multiple representations of [herself]” (R. Overstreet and N. Zuckerman, op. cit., 2021, p. 46). “Playing at being another person or one’s imagined self,” the artist observed, “is all about self-invention” (quoted in ibid.). Indeed, embracing an idea of a “metamorphic body” allowed Fini to challenge notions around selfhood, particularly with regards to gender (R. Grew, op. cit., 2019, p. 19). She, like many female artists associated with Surrealism, developed proto-feminist imagery by referencing myths, spiritual symbolism, and the occult with the aim of depicting women not as eroticized muses, as in the art of many of her male contemporaries, but rather as formidable beings who were “awake, watching, powerful” (L. Fini quoted in V. Ferentinou, “Agents of Change: Women as Magical Beings” in G. Subelytė and D. Zamani, Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, exh. cat., The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2022, p. 168).
Although Fini was close to various Surrealist artists, including Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, and René Magritte, she never identified as a Surrealist artist herself. She was largely self-taught, having developed an interest in Renaissance and Mannerist art—the latter’s influence is evident in the elongated figures of the present work—as well Gustav Klimt, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the German and French Romantics, artists she had discovered as an adolescent while exploring her uncle’s extensive library. While Surrealism offered Fini a language to consider the representation of the unconscious, she preferred instead to chart her own course. “I always imagined that I would have a life very different from the one imagined for me,” she said, “but I understood from a very early time that I would have to revolt in order to make that life” (quoted in W. Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Moment, London, 1985, p. 86).
Painted shortly after their meeting, the magisterial Dans la tour (Autoportrait avec Constantin Jeleński) depicts Fini and Jeleński strolling through a tower. The stone edifice is the Torre San Lorenzo on the Latium coast of Italy, where the two had spent the summer. This was also the setting for the short film La Torre del surreale, which narrated Fini’s working methods and included a brief glimpse of the present work.
Paintings of Fini with Jeleński are exceedingly rare, and the importance of Dans la tour within the artist’s oeuvre has been repeatedly noted by scholars. The art historian Peter Webb called Dans la tour Fini’s “most impressive painting of this period,” and went on to note that “it is an image of female power and wisdom, executed in meticulous detail” (Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, New York, 2009, p. 549). The work is featured on the cover of the collector’s and deluxe editions of Fini’s catalogue raisonné and has been requested for the artist’s 2026 retrospective at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Dans la tour was included in the 2020 exhibition Fantastic Women at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.
In Dans la tour, Jeleński, who is nude, is guided by a clothed Fini through this magical realm towards the unknown wonders that await. Such positioning was characteristic of Fini, who so often subverted contemporary gender conventions and often inserted her own image in her compositions as a means of affirming her individuality and autonomy. Fini’s women experience “a separate reality,” argues Estella Lauter. “They are in touch with forces beyond themselves in a space which lies beyond the windows, doors, and screens that figure so prominently in Fini's backgrounds” (“Leonor Fini: Preparing to Meet the Strangers of the New World” in Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 1980, p. 47). In a world that so often privileged men, Fini ensured that women were rendered with prominence and importance. By painting her own face in Dans la tour (Autoportrait avec Constantin Jeleński), she defines her image and thus control her legacy.
Here, Fini wears a long gown while a Baroque red cape is draped elegantly around Jeleński’s body. The details of their clothing have been meticulously rendered using small, painstaking brushwork. Fini had a “passion” for textiles and could pass hours looking “long and hard at the convolutions of sheets, bedspreads, and clothes in the half-light of [her] bedroom” (L. Fini, “In Her Own Words” in R. Overstreet and N. Zuckerman, op. cit., Zurich, 2021, p. 35). This attention to fabric’s material qualities aligned with the artist’s larger interest in clothing—although painting was her primary occupation, she designed sets and costumes for productions by, among others, George Balanchine, John Huston, and Federico Fellini, including the latter’s acclaimed film 8½. Fini herself was known for the extravagant outfits she wore to the costume balls that were all the rage in Paris during this period. “The only reason I went to the balls was the opportunity to dress up,” she said. “The true party for me was the preparation of my costume” (quoted in R. Grew, “Leonor Fini and Dressing UP: An Act of Creativity” in Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 40, no. 1, 2019, p. 17).
For Fini, sartorial fantasy helped her to project herself into new and otherworldly realms, a central theme within her artistic practice. Costume provided a means for transformation, be that aesthetic or psychological, and in her paintings, Fini hoped to “convey one or multiple representations of [herself]” (R. Overstreet and N. Zuckerman, op. cit., 2021, p. 46). “Playing at being another person or one’s imagined self,” the artist observed, “is all about self-invention” (quoted in ibid.). Indeed, embracing an idea of a “metamorphic body” allowed Fini to challenge notions around selfhood, particularly with regards to gender (R. Grew, op. cit., 2019, p. 19). She, like many female artists associated with Surrealism, developed proto-feminist imagery by referencing myths, spiritual symbolism, and the occult with the aim of depicting women not as eroticized muses, as in the art of many of her male contemporaries, but rather as formidable beings who were “awake, watching, powerful” (L. Fini quoted in V. Ferentinou, “Agents of Change: Women as Magical Beings” in G. Subelytė and D. Zamani, Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, exh. cat., The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2022, p. 168).
Although Fini was close to various Surrealist artists, including Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, and René Magritte, she never identified as a Surrealist artist herself. She was largely self-taught, having developed an interest in Renaissance and Mannerist art—the latter’s influence is evident in the elongated figures of the present work—as well Gustav Klimt, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the German and French Romantics, artists she had discovered as an adolescent while exploring her uncle’s extensive library. While Surrealism offered Fini a language to consider the representation of the unconscious, she preferred instead to chart her own course. “I always imagined that I would have a life very different from the one imagined for me,” she said, “but I understood from a very early time that I would have to revolt in order to make that life” (quoted in W. Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Moment, London, 1985, p. 86).