Fiore de Henriquez; sculptor & hermaphrodite
Hyfler/Rosner
all her portraits. Go through it decade by decade. The one
of Kennedy is astonishing. Great artist. Great obit.
Fiore de Henriquez
(Filed: 11/06/2004) Telegraph
http://www.peraltatuscany.com/fiore/
http://www.transgender-net.de/Leben/kunst/henri.html
http://www.peraltatuscany.com/fiore/section-2/frames_index.html
Fiore De Henriquez, who died on Saturday aged 82, was one of
the most respected and prolific figures in post-war
sculpture; she ranged from portrait busts to crucifixions
and pietas, and from semi-abstract and mythical figures to
life-sized statues and monumental public commissions.
Fiore de Henriquez's work revealed an intuitive grasp of
plastic form and a keen eye for expression and character,
yet she herself remained something of an enigma, and it was
only in the last few years that she revealed to the writer
Jan Marsh (whose biography of Fiore de Henriquez is to be
published shortly), that she was, in fact, a hermaphrodite.
Brought up as a girl in pre-war Italy, Fiore discovered her
androgyny at puberty when, as well as beginning menstruation
and developing breasts, she discovered that she also had
male genitalia. She kept this secret from family and friends
and, though she always felt more male than female (she was
attracted to women, never to men), she always referred to
herself as a "sculptress", channelling her prodigious
energies into her art.
She saw the creative process as a metaphor for her own
duality: "I begin to embrace a piece of clay; it is soft and
pliable, all feminine," she told Jan Marsh. "Then it goes
hard, terracotta, and is cast in plaster, pure gesso, virile
and rigid, that I carve with a knife. Next it is made all
feminine in wax, all pliable once more, to be caressed and
stroked. Then masculine again in bronze, hard and solid. All
the time, you must think: will you leave something feminine,
or make it more masculine; how will you shape and finish
it?"
It was possibly this struggle between the warring sides of
her nature that gave Fiore de Henriquez's art its vitality
and extraordinary diversity.
Even in portrait sculpture, she could range from craggy
vividness - as in her bust of Augustus John - to classical
sensitivity - as in her head of Odette Churchill.
Some found her androgyny repellent - there were not very
subtly coded references in the press to her "mannish"
appearance, "broad shoulders", "beetling eyebrows", and
"hefty shoes". But others found her compelling and she
formed deep friendships with people of both sexes.
One to come under her spell was the painter Augustus John,
who met her at a London dinner party in the early 1950s.
"Her dark, savage but eminently attractive features under a
mop of coal-black hair, might have deserved the epithet
'saturnine'," John recalled, "but for the geniality and high
spirits which animated her flashing Adriatic eyes. Her
stalwart legs were encased in black velvet breeches
ornamented with pearl buttons, with white stockings and
buckled shoes. A regular Macaroni!"
They became great friends and she encouraged him to try his
hand at sculpting. "A whole new phase in my history opened
up," he recalled. "Provided by Fiore with everything I
needed, I set to work to produce a head of W B Yeats from
memory. I bless the day I met Fiore."
Although she executed thousands of commissions, Fiore de
Henriquez, possibly out of fear of the hostility which her
appearance often provoked, never tried to establish a
reputation and suffered from critical neglect. It was only
in later life that she began to exhibit regularly and
attracted some of the recognition that was her due.
Maria Fiore de Henriquez was born at Trieste on June 20 1921
into a family of complex ancestry. On her father's side she
was descended from Spanish noblemen of the Habsburg court in
Vienna; her grandfather and great uncles had served as
vice-admirals in the Austro-Hungarian navy. Her mother was
of Turkish-Russian origin.
It was always clear that Fiore was different. She adored her
father and elder brother, but her mother was always angry
with her. A few minutes after Fiore was born, she thrust her
into cold water to see if she would survive. She insisted on
dressing her in frocks and ribbons, which Fiore detested.
"Why have you such a beautiful daughter," her mother asked
Margot Fonteyn's mother, "when I have this monster?"
As a child in Mussolini's Italy, Fiore joined the Fascist
youth movement, becoming leader of its girls' gymnastic
team. But in 1935 her beloved father was denounced as an
anti-fascist and sent into internal exile for refusing to
Italianise his name.
Fiore had no particular interest in art but, while studying
languages and philosophy in Venice, she saw someone working
in clay and found her vocation.
After briefly studying at the Accademia under Arturo
Martini, she moved during the War to the Dolomite resort of
Cortona d'Ampezzo. There she began to sculpt for some of the
wealthier residents and did clandestine work helping
partisans and Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi occupation.
Towards the end of the war she was captured and interrogated
by the occupying Nazi forces, but managed to escape by
jumping from the window of an upstairs lavatory.
After the war, Fiore de Henriquez moved to Florence where
she became studio assistant to the sculptor Antonio Berti,
who helped her to arrange her first exhibition, in 1947. It
was a sell-out. She then moved south to Positano on the
Amalfi coast, where the wheelchair-bound German painter Kurt
Kramer asked her to marry him. She was fond of him and
briefly considered the matter before dismissing it as
impossible.
In 1949 she won her first major public commission, for the
main square of Salerno. But when her identity was revealed
at the unveiling, rival artists conspired to destroy her
figure because she was a woman and an outsider. Deeply
upset, she decided to move to London.
Her first commission, a portrait of the Royal sculptor Sir
William Reid Dick, brought her immediate recognition at the
Royal Academy - she had two heads in the 1950 summer show -
and in 1951 Jacob Epstein invited her to create three
enormous figures for the Festival of Britain, for which she
negotiated a then astronomical fee of £4,000. Meanwhile
society hostesses with bohemian tastes competed to secure
her exotic presence at their tables.
From then on she was deluged with commissions - in 1954, she
was reported to have completed no fewer than 500 portrait
busts in four years. Her sitters included the Queen Mother,
Odette Churchill, Alicia Markova, Laurence Olivier, Igor
Stravinsky Peter Ustinov and Margot Fonteyn. "For a new
person I always wear a skirt when I visit their homes for
the first time," she explained. "Afterwards they understand
me better in trousers." She took British citizenship in
1957.
In 1955 she travelled to America to work with the architect
Claude Phillimore on an abortive design for a civic centre
in Hollywood for the millionaire Huntingdon Hartford. From
then on she travelled widely, flitting between London,
Italy, Japan Hong Kong and America, where, for 20 years, she
undertook an annual two-month tour demonstrating her art (in
the early days, Jennifer Paterson of Two Fat Ladies worked
as her administrative assistant).
In 1963 she was commissioned to do a bust of President
Kennedy, a project which had to be completed posthumously
from photographs. Later commissions included 20 life-sized
bronzes of racehorses and their jockeys for a race course in
New York.
American modernism inspired her to experiment with looser
forms and she developed new motifs, often involving
conjoined figures which seemed to represent the duality of
her nature. In the early 1960s she found a new mentor in the
cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, whom she introduced to the
bronze foundries of Pietrasanta, in Italy.
It was on a visit to Italy in 1968 that she discovered and
later bought the ruined hamlet of Peralta, north of Lucca,
which became her base. She restored the buildings, creating
an haven where artists could come to write, sculpt or simply
walk in the hills.
But during the mid-1960s, she suffered some kind of mental
breakdown after undergoing surgery to remove her male
reproductive organs. While physiologically the operation was
a success, it did nothing to remove her feelings of duality,
and she produced a series of tortured pieces inspired by
mythological creatures - half beast, half human.
But she eventually recovered and in 1985 she built a tower
in Peralta to celebrate its resurrection, and possibly her
own recovery.