Description: An analysis of surrealist artist Leonor Fini's self-fashioning and dressing-up practices that explores broader questions of gender and identity performance, creating and styling the self and the woman artist's role.
Brief description: Andrea Kollnitz is professor of Art History and head of the Art History Department, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her current research is focused on the self-fashioning of the avant-garde artist; nationalist visual and textual fashion and art discourse, fashion photography and caricature. She is co-editor, with Marco Pecorari, of Fashion, Performance and Performativity (2021), and, with Louise Wallenberg, of Fashion and Modernism (2018).
Review Quotes:
"Elegantly written and deeply researched, this book will fascinate all those interested in the histories of art, photography, fashion and costume. Containing unseen images of this fascinating and elusive artist, it makes an important contribution to theories of self-performance, queer identities and gender; its rich content will inspire new generations of surrealists, Fini fans, and anyone who adores dressing-up." --Christopher Breward, Director of National Museums Scotland, UK
"An urgent contribution to the field of women artists and surrealism, this book offers a detailed and illuminating analysis of Fini's art and life, conceived as a constant process of becoming embodied in elaborate and empowering practices of evocation, transfiguration, self-imagination and, above all, transformative self-performance." --Patricia Allmer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Edinburgh, UK "Becoming Leonor Fini is a smart, beautiful and compelling book. Bringing extraordinary images and archival material together through elegant prose and cogent argument, Kollnitz makes sense of the costumed theatricality of Fini's self-performance without losing sight of its mercurial mutability. It is destined to be a classic." --Marsha Meskimmon, Emerita Professor of Transnational Art and Feminisms, Loughborough University, UK