Leonor Fini’s The Umbrella

and the story of the hidden eye

This is a dark and disturbing painting by Leonor Fini from 1948.  Fini never officially joined the surrealist movement, being sceptical of Breton’s attitudes to women and too independently-minded to fit in with rules of any kind. 

The picture shows a broken umbrella and behind it you will find an eye, partially hidden, in the upper left-hand side.  Below the eye is possibly a shoulder.  This imaginary meeting is with whoever the eye and the shoulder belong to, and it begins as they come into existence, painted by Fini.

There is an audio version included below the picture so, if you wish, you can listen to the words while looking closely at this shadowy and mysterious painting. 

Welcome to all the new subscribers and thank you for being here.  Do leave a comment or say hello after reading the post.

At first, all was blackness then, gently, I felt the soft stroking of hairs.  It was a brush, licking me like a kitten’s tongue and in fact leaving a little cat fur on my new, becoming-solid, form.  I could hear the mewing of many felines in the far distance and smell rich Indian spices as well as an unpleasant fishy odour.  I heard a ripping noise as some fabric in front of me was pulled tight and torn.

When at last I became an eye, it all made sense.  I was behind a broken umbrella with brutal rods and rivets thrusting through it.  The umbrella, with its ruffled edges, was in fact a ladies' parasol.  A length of pink striped silk fabric was draped over it and, above me on the left, were some stinking rotten fish hanging on string from a tree, which was also dead.

Looking back at me was my maker with her caressing brush.  Only occasionally did she meet my gaze; there was obviously much still to do to make my world complete.  Where I am is dark and dank.  I’d much rather be over there, with her.  She is astonishingly beautiful and there are cats in number twisting around her legs mewling for their dinner. Maybe they can catch the scent of the fish hanging in here with me—or are there also some out in her world hung up for her to copy?  The cats are drooling and desperate, and she laughs at them.

She is wearing trousers and, as she paints me a shoulder, I receive some of her memories through her gentle, paint-heavy brush.  She used to dress as a boy to evade her bully of a father as he pursued her and her mother from country to country: from Argentina to Italy.  Finally, as a grown woman, she escaped to France.  As she darkens my world with more and more black paint, I feel with a shiver how closely she has followed death all her life, beginning at age 13 when she visited the morgue daily to study the corpses from the hospital.  What an education!  She loved the 16th-century Mannerist paintings with their vivid colours and reminders of mortality. 

One day, though she doesn’t know it, this obsession will come back as a trend.  Young people will become fixated on death and call themselves Goths.  The ripped clothing she wears is prescient, too: she was a Punk, in the 1940s!  I can see that she has smuggled so much into her art that is ready for the future including her individual style, which is the nobility of a man and the sensuality of a woman combined.  They didn’t know what to do with my maker; they had never seen anyone like her before.  She knew that her cats—23 of them – would be her best and wisest companions.

Now she is adding more damage to the parasol and recoiling from it.  Suddenly I realise that not only am I in a place of death, decay and darkness, but I am looking out of it as the survivor of an attack.  Am I still whole?  I can’t be sure.  All I have is my clever, far-seeing eye and my broad, clothed shoulder because this terrible event I represent, this violation of slashing and tearing, has overwhelmed me.

What I illustrate, I suspect, is one of the surrealists’ favourite lines of poetry.  They used to chant it like a mantra: ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table’.  My maker has anticipated the feminist ideas of the future and unpacked that line of poetry to reveal it as an aggressive sexual metaphor: the feminine parasol violently pierced by the machine on the scientist’s table.  Best of all, she has added me into this painting.  I am the woman hidden behind the poetic idea and mine is not a happy story. 

You are still drawn to the morgue, my Leonor, and to the sad knowledge of the pain that a corpse betrays.  So I will remain here while you return to your life of delight and rebellion.  I will be the witness to the outrages of the night, while you live in the brightly-lit days of creative liberation.