LGBT+ History Month - Meet Fiore de Henriquez, intersex antifascist sculptor
FEBRUARY is LGBT+ History Month, an annual celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans & non-binary history.
In the UK it is celebrated in February each year, to coincide with the 2003 abolition of Section 28, a law passed in 1988 by the UK government that stopped councils and schools in England & Wales ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.’
The aim is to be an exciting, informative and celebratory month, to educate out prejudice and make LGBT+ people, in all their rich diversity, visible. This year's theme is ‘Politics In Art’. LGBT+ History Month is spotlighting five people to illustrate this theme. Here is the fifth:
Fiore de Henriquez
20th June 1921 - 5th June 2004
Fiore was born in Trieste in Italy to a mother of Turkish origin and her father came from a line of Spanish noblemen of the Habsburgh court in Vienna.
As a teenager, she was part of the fascist youth movement. In 1935, her father was denounced as an anti-fascist as he refused to Italinise his name, and was sent into internal exile. During the German occupation of northern Italy, she helped escort Jewish refugees to safety. At the end of the war, she was caught by the Germans and they interrogated her - she luckily managed to escape through the window of a toilet.
While studying philosophy and literature in Venice, she made friends with some of the arts students. While helping one of the studios knead the clay, she started making a head, which became a self-portrait and led to her becoming a sculptor. She studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Venice from 1939-1942.
Her first exhibition was in Florence in 1947. In 1949, she won a competition for a civic statue in Salerno. For this, she created a monument in bronze of anti-fascist Don Giovanni Cuomo. When the men present realised that a woman had won the competition, they destroyed the monument.
In fact, Fiore was not exactly, or wholly female. Raised as a girl, at puberty she developed both gender attributes. Later, a sympathetic doctor prescribed male hormones - Fiore at this stage aspired to join the Carabinieri - but after a while she stopped. To accommodate a female bust and male hips she created a dress style of smock, knee breeches, and a fine fedora that led to many challenges in churches and toilets.
Following this, she left for England. In the first few months of living in London, she had some commissions for portrait sculptures. In 1950, she had two head sculptures exhibited in the Royal Academy summer exhibition and, following this, she was commissioned to produce work for the Festival of Britain in 1951.
She divided her time between Tuscany and London, and had a studio in London. She became a British citizen in 1953. She had two solo shows in Rome,in 1975 and 1983. During the second half of the 50s to 1965, she travelled around the USA.
As part of her work, de Henriquez created portrait sculptures of many people, including Oprah Winfrey, Laurence Olivier and Igor Starvinsky. Between 1948 and 2004, she created 4000 portraits.
Her experience of being intersex informed her work. Androgyny was a common theme, as well as ambiguous creatures, conjoined figures and twinning motifs of paired heads. She declared herself ‘proud to be hermaphrodite’ and ‘two people inside one body’. Gay author Christopher Isherwood described her as appearing ‘dressed like a male peasant in Cavalleria Rusticana and announc[ing] that she had a love for life’.
She died on the 5th June 2004 at the age of 82 in Peralta, a hamlet which she helped restore.
