Between Decadence and Surrealism: The Art & Writing of Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning

For women artists associated with the Surrealist movement, the modern heroine reigned over life and death and often with a decadent sensibility. Leonor Fini stages woman as sphinx, Dorothea Tanning stages her as sorcerer, bringing the accursed beauty of woman of some of their favoured artists and writers - Félicien Rops, Fernand Khnopff, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, into the modern-day. Rejecting woman as the quintessential figure of virtue, procreation, or nourishment, they turned instead to the themes of sensuality, seduction and sadism to fashion woman, and their own artistic selves, as the very embodiment of vice. They began a new proto-feminist potential in ‘temptation’, revealing knowledge through the sins of the earth.

This paper will focus on temptation and avant-garde expression through the cases of Fini and Tanning and their experiences in a war-torn world. Looking to their painting and writing, it will consider how they promoted a new woman – their own future Eve who spoke to new psychic awareness and often revelled in sexual terror. I will reflect on how they advanced and subverted the female protagonists of male Symbolists and Surrealists, but more importantly fashioned a powerful sense of decadence with radical expressive and socio-political dimensions.