Galerie Raphaël Durazzo

Richard Overstreet is the rights holder of Leonor Fini and Stanislao Lepri and co-author of the catalogue raisonné. A close friend of both, Richard Overstreet is dedicated to promoting the work of the two artists. Himself an artist and photographer, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts. He settled in Paris in the early 1960s and worked as a journalist at Time-Life, then became a production assistant for United Artists, and later a first assistant for various American directors including John Huston. It was during the filming of his movie “Walk with Love and Death” in 1968 that he met Leonor Fini, the costume designer for the film. He has been involved in organizing all the retrospectives of Stanislao Lepri’s work, without abandoning his own painting practice, and he continues to exhibit in both the United States and in France.

Stanislao Lepri was born in Rome in 1905. He was born into a conservative aristocratic family. This family heritage led him to follow the same path as his ancestors: pursuing a career in diplomacy. He became the Italian consul in Monaco and later in Belgium. It was this choice that led him to meet, in a cinema in Monte Carlo, the fascinating and intoxicating Leonor Fini, who encouraged him to paint and create. From his early beginnings, he was inspired by surrealism.

In 1946, the trio of Stanislao Lepri, Leonor Fini, and the Polish writer Constantin Jelenski settled in Paris, rue Payenne in the Marais district. That same year, he definitively left the diplomatic world. At the age of 37, he began his artistic career. He exhibited his works in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium. Leading figures in the art market of that time, such as Alexandre Iolas and Jean Charpentier, represented him.

Lepri drew inspiration from art history. His dreamlike world is made up of the macabre and spirituality. His art is metaphysical, inviting the viewer into his visions and personal thoughts. Sometimes melancholic, sometimes demonic, the creatures that take shape on his canvases remind us, not without irony, of the absurdity of the human condition. His personality is marked by the duality between his aristocratic family heritage and the artist’s life he led in Paris: he strives to represent the distance he puts between himself and the constraints of the social class he comes from. His art is primarily an entry into his philosophical universe, which transports us to another dimension, his own. Like Leonor Fini, he also devoted himself to stage design and costume creation for the theater.

“The Armida” in Florence for the Maggio Fiorentino and “The Voyage to the Moon of the United States” by Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac are among the most emblematic pieces.

Stanislao Lepri died in Paris in 1980. His works are part of the collections of major museums worldwide: the MoMA, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and many others.