mlle de carabas
06-16-04, 09:04 PM
I'm not sure if anyone's seen this, I got it from groups.yahoo.com/group/transgendernews:
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 04 08:05:52 -0700
From: Gwendolyn Ann Smith
Subject: [NEWS] [UK] Obiturary: Fiore de Henriquez
sSheet=/portal/2004/06/11/ixportal.html>
Fiore de Henriquez
11/06/2004
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.
--
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
. .
/\\//\ Gwendolyn Ann Smith * www.gwensmith.com
> () < Columnist, Bay Area Reporter & Philadelphia Gay News
\/()\/ Board Member, FTMI * Board Member, GEA
"I want this to be a harmony of voices" - Lauren D. Wilson
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 04 08:05:52 -0700
From: Gwendolyn Ann Smith
Subject: [NEWS] [UK] Obiturary: Fiore de Henriquez
sSheet=/portal/2004/06/11/ixportal.html>
Fiore de Henriquez
11/06/2004
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.
--
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
. .
/\\//\ Gwendolyn Ann Smith * www.gwensmith.com
> () < Columnist, Bay Area Reporter & Philadelphia Gay News
\/()\/ Board Member, FTMI * Board Member, GEA
"I want this to be a harmony of voices" - Lauren D. Wilson