In Magick Without Tears Aleister Crowley suggested that artists engage in gnostic experience during their acts of creati0n: “…all true Art is spontaneous, is genius, is utterly beyond all conscious knowledge or control…”
No artistic movements seemed more closely intertwined with magick per se as Surrealism and when our beloved OHO questioned EGC Bishop, seminal avant-garde filmmaker and painter Harry Smith about how deeply the Surrealists were into magick per se he replied, “It was big business — but nobody talked about it.”
Leonor Fini worked alongside the Surrealists and I’d suggest that her work resembles that of artist/mage Leonora Carrington (see multiple O=II posts!) but is little known in this country. But an exhibition is currently running in NYC that the New York Times is touting. Their review begins:
“The artist Leonor Fini worked tirelessly throughout most of the 20th century, often alongside universally acknowledged masters like Max Ernst, André Breton and George Balanchine. Her paintings and designs were shown in London, Paris and New York over decades. Portraits of her, an eccentric European artiste draped in wild costume at fancy masquerade balls, regularly appeared in magazines like Life.
“Fini also had three works in the landmark 1936 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by the museum’s founder, Alfred H. Barr Jr. But the museum owns none of her work, and she remains little known in the United States.
“A new exhibition at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan aims to remedy that. “Leonor Fini: Theater of Desire” is the first American retrospective devoted to her paintings, drawings and other objects, and it fills two floors of the museum.”
read the entire article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/arts/design/leonor-fini-artist.html?fbclid=IwAR0hP6qEEBcjhDiWf3uVu7JR237Hl9F8Jk6YxtJFzUdzXKkew2OD6sdQU74.
