Painter, draughtswoman, illustrator and costume designer, born on 30 August 1907 in Buenos Aires, died on 18 January 1996 in Paris.
Life
Less than eighteen months after her birth, her mother, who came from Trieste, took her back to that city, where she grew up. In her early teens an eye disease decided her to become an artist. She moved to Milan at seventeen and held her first solo exhibition there in 1929, at the Galleria Barbaroux. At that time she knew Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, whose metaphysical painting marked her beginnings.
She settled in Paris in 1931 and exhibited from 1932 at the Galerie Jacques Bonjean. She spent time with Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Salvador Dalí. Without ever officially joining the Surrealist group, she exhibited alongside its members. In New York the Julien Levy Gallery gave her two exhibitions, in 1936 and 1939, and in 1943 Peggy Guggenheim selected her for Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery.
She shared her life with the Italian count Stanislao Lepri, who gave up diplomacy to follow her, then with the Polish writer Konstanty Jeleński, whom she met in Rome in January 1952 and who moved into her Paris flat in October of that year. All three remained inseparable until their deaths.
The work
Beyond painting, most of her activity between 1944 and 1972 was devoted to costumes, for theatre, ballet, opera and film: Les Demoiselles de la nuit (1948), the first ballet of Roland Petit’s Ballets de Paris, Le Rêve de Leonor (1949), choreographed by Frederick Ashton to music by Benjamin Britten, with hybrid half-human, half-animal costumes, and the films Romeo and Juliet by Renato Castellani (1954) and A Walk with Love and Death by John Huston (1968). At the end of the 1930s she worked for Elsa Schiaparelli, for whom she designed the bottle of the perfume Shocking.
She illustrated some fifty books, among them Sade’s Juliette (1944 edition), the Satyricon, texts by Jean Genet, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare, and Lise Deharme’s Le Poids d’un oiseau (1955). She also wrote, notably the novel Rogomelec (Stock, 1979). She lived surrounded by Persian cats, up to twenty-three at a time.
Exhibitions and collections
- 1929: first solo exhibition, Galleria Barbaroux, Milan
- 1936 and 1939: Julien Levy Gallery, New York
- 1986: retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, with more than 260 works
- Public collections: Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art moderne de Paris, Musée de Grenoble, Museo Revoltella (Trieste), Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice), Tate (London), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Art Institute of Chicago