Even death is turned “all to prettiness and favour”.Yet there’s nothing wrong with camp, after all, “the lie that tells the truth”, and especially in her Sapphic paintings Fini achieved high camp of the first order. While she claimed categorically not to be a lesbian but open to everything, the temperature rises only when two of her elegant and immaculate girls are involved. The young woman’s hair for example has obviously just been set by a fashionable Parisian crimper. The swamp and the dead animals, while suggesting putrefaction, in no way imply the stench of decay. On the contrary one suspects it is all more likely to smell of Schiaparelli’s “Shocking”, for which Fini designed the bottle in the shape of a naked female torso. She was also a very talented illustrator in the glossy magazines.Leonor Fini was indeed obsessed with death, but somehow the spectator is not at all alarmed by her depictions of it.

That astute critic the late Robert Melville described one of her corpses as “a bright green cadaver daintily spotted with magenta blood”. It shows a beautiful young woman up to her breasts in black swampy water on which float the skulls of various creatures under a red sunset. I have my suspicions that this may have its origins, given Fini’s enthusiasm for the Pre-Raphaelites, in Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat, but, whereas Hunt’s vision is tragic if slightly absurd, Fini’s, as so often, is rather camp. There are echoes of de Sade (at one point she illustrated his Justine) but it is de Sade for Vogue. Even in her most extreme imagery Fini remained totally in control. In 1949 for example she painted a picture called The End of the World, an apocalyptic enough subject, you might have thought.

He in his turn was shocked – for he was in many ways extremely puritanical – by her sometime scandalous behaviour and her fondness for the company of homosexuals (Breton was for whatever reason a ferocious homophobe).How good an artist was she? Not a great one, certainly, but a very interesting one. She did however exhibit with the group as a kind of fellow traveller.For Whitney Chadwick, the feminist author of that remarkable and very carefully titled book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985), she is a hero, as indeed are any of the women Surrealists who failed to be seduced by Breton’s good manners and formidable charisma. Like her greater contemporary Frida Kahlo, Fini refused to bend her knee before Andre Breton, and declined to accept the iconic role of child-woman or to accept his belief in l’amour fou, the monogamist obsession with one person as opposed to bisexual narcissism. By the time she was 17 she was already painting commissioned portraits.

It was however in 1936 when she moved to Paris and became friendly with Ernst, the Eluards, Brauner and others, that she began to paint Surrealist images and to draw close to the movement Close but not of. In reproduction she was to add Beardsley, the German Romantics and the British Pre-Raphaelites – all evidence of a Surrealist eye.Her facility was precocious. Her formal education was, as might be imagined given her independent and imperious temperament, fragmentary, but she had the run of her uncle’s large library in Milan and also travelled widely in Italy and Europe visiting all the museums and taking in such then unfashionable painters as the Mannerists, a school later reflected in her own work. “Her allure,” he says, “was an ability to dominate her misfitted parts so that they merged into whatever shape her fantasy wished to present from one moment to the next.” You can almost hear the faggots crackle.
Leonor Fini was of mixed Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Slavic blood, a formidable genetic cocktail She was born in Buenos Aires in 1908 but grew up in Trieste. .”

Levy confirms my belief that if she had been born in the age of the extra teat and the familiar, this lady was for burning. In the 17th century Leonor Fini would have been burnt as a witch.

Surrounded by cats, and with feline eyes herself, she exuded what her one-time lover Max Ernst described as “Italian fury, scandalous elegance, caprice and passion.” In photographs you would take her for beautiful in the manner of Bianca Jagger but, according to the American art dealer Julian Levy, she was not a beauty as such, in that “Her parts did not fit well together: head of a lioness, mind of a man, bust of a woman, torso of a child, grace of an angel, discourse of the Devil. I offer, too late, this poem: “Your death is beyond belief / which you never had, anyway / It comes upon one as a private grief / – the ultimate enemy.Angus CalderNorman Alexander MacCaig, poet: born Edinburgh 14 November 1910; FRSL 1965; Fellow in Creative Writing, Edinburgh University 1967-69; Lecturer in English Studies, Stirling University 1970-72, Reader in Poetry 1972- 77; OBE 1979; ARSA 1981; FRSE 1983; Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 1986; married 1940 Isabel Munro (died 1990; one son, one daughter); died Edinburgh 23 January 1996.. We plotted to surprise him with a bottle of whisky in his home in Leamington Terrace We never did it I regret that. I was out on the tiles a few months ago with a young skinhead Scottish writer domiciled on what I suppose we will come to call the Irvine Welsh Heritage Trail. He surprised me by expressing his utter love of MacCaig’s verse. We deplored together the fact that MacCaig was in failing health, never quite himself again after the loss of his much-loved consort, Isabel. MacCaig’s messages are about quiet decency, in quiet places.His place in Scottish literature is unique, as the best recent writer in English, pure English The achievement wins praise where you don’t expect it.