Leonor Fini’s Witches

This lecture investigates the motif of the witch across surrealist artist Leonor Fini’s (1907–1996) oeuvre, focusing in particular on the central position this figure occupies in her 1970s work. While Fini’s most sustained treatment of the witch appears to be the series of etchings published in the book Le Sabbat ressuscité par Leonor Fini (1957) this lecture suggests that her return to this motif in the 1970s crystallizes its feminist significance. Notably, in 1976 Fini designed the cover image of the inaugural issue of the feminist journal Sorcières: Les femmes vivent, founded and edited by feminist critic and theorist Xavière Gauthier. Like virtually all Fini’s witches, the female figure adorning the cover of Sorcières is depicted astride a broomstick. The same year as the publication of the first issue of Sorcières, Fini released her first novel, Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus, which, while primarily focusing on the incestuous sexual relationship between a young cat-boy and his mother, also includes a short episode detailing how witches learn to fly on their broomsticks. This talk unpacks the ironic Freudian symbolism of Fini’s broom-riding witches and investigates their resonance with contemporary poststructuralist feminist critiques of psychoanalytic theories of female sexuality (by e.g. Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and, notably, Xavière Gauthier). Anna Watz is Associate Professor of English at Linköping University, Sweden. She is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ (Routledge, 2016) and editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester University Press, 2020) and A History of the Surrealist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She has published extensively on the art and writing of Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, and she is currently completing a monograph titled Surrealism and Feminine Difference, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Organised by Professor Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld) and Dr Caroline Levitt (The Courtauld).