Iria Leino, Fashion Icon Turned Forgotten Artist, Finally Gets Her Due

Rare is the fashion model whose career has legs as long as her own. For every Carmen Dell’Orefice, Naomi Campbell, or Kate Moss, there are thousands who disappear—none, perhaps, more effectively than Iria Leino. Along with Bettina and Dovima, the Finnish American beauty was one of the first models to go by a single name; then, in 1964, she fled fashion forever.

Now Leino is having a comeback, not as a model of brief renown in Europe, but as the artist she was in New York. This month, two years after her death, at 90, from leukemia, Harper’s gallery in New York is introducing that Leino: an obsessive painter of luminous abstractions with only one solo U.S. show to her credit.

That show was in 1966.

Probably no one in the art world today remembers the exhibition or its venue, the Panoras Gallery, a long defunct midtown emporium where a graduate student named Donald Judd had debuted as a painter 10 years prior. But Leino’s exhibition did not go unheeded: It brought her press, at least one big sale—to the fashion designer and art collector Larry Aldrich—and, to top it all off, a spot on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

The number of visual artists invited onto late-night television in those days was about the same as it is now: almost none, unless they were media hounds like Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, or painted themselves in the nude at the age of 80, as did Alice Neel. But instead of capitalizing on that acclaim, Leino went into seclusion. After a freak accident in 1968 caused a head injury that required brain surgery, she converted to Buddhism, to which she had initially been introduced by “Gurudev,” the populist Sri Swami Satchidananda. In her will, she named the two yoga centers he founded, in New York and Virginia, her only beneficiaries.

“She went to Integral Yoga Institute and sat in the back of a room with a hundred people,” says Robert Saasto, an attorney and the executor of her estate. “She felt she had an out-of-body experience with the swami, eyeball to eyeball, and she was hooked.”

Leino remained devoted to painting, however, even though she barely scraped by. Her refusal to submit to a patriarchal system that largely discounted women contributed to her obscurity. In the early 1980s, she even sent the power dealer Leo Castelli packing, and rarely permitted anyone to see her work again. “She was very ‘my way or the highway,’ ” says Varpu Sihvonen, a Finnish journalist who worked in New York and is one of the few people alive to have known the artist well. “Very, very private. If I asked to see her paintings, she would say, ‘Yes, but not now.’ That was her way of saying no.”

Harper Levine is saying yes. A bookseller and art dealer who operates a hybrid gallery and rare bookstore in East Hampton, as well as two galleries in Manhattan, he is showing canvases from Leino’s “Color Field” and “Buddhist Rain” series, two distinct bodies of work that she made in the late 1960s and early ’70s, respectively. “Those paintings spoke to me,” he says. “Their strangeness makes them compelling, and this was a great opportunity to bring what I believe is a historically important voice into the current dialogue around painting.”

Nonetheless, it’s a risky proposition for a contemporary dealer to introduce a deceased 20th-century modernist with no track record to a skittish election-year market. “I think there’s a real hunger among collectors for artists who were forgotten or never known,” Levine counters. As proof, he cites Vivian Springford, an American contemporary of Leino’s who fell by the wayside; today her abstractions sell at auction for six figures. Another case is the recent runaway success of the late Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong.

Levine did not find his way to Leino on his own. He got wind of her through Peter Hastings Falk, an art historian who is writing a critical biography about her. Falk has rather heroically cataloged the hundreds of unseen paintings that Leino left in her dusty SoHo loft, along with voluminous diaries and letters in Finnish, English, and French that he is still deciphering.

Falk has made a specialty of resurrecting neglected artists and features them in his online magazine, Discoveries in American Art—one reason Saasto gave him the job. The lawyer describes Leino’s loft as “stacked with art everywhere, and all this cardboard! You could hardly walk. I went there with the head of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. He said three things were needed to make any artist successful: One was a lot of art; we had that. Second, it had to be unique. And third, we’d need a good story—and her story is beyond.”

Born Taiteilija Irja Leino in Helsinki, Leino graduated from the city’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955 with a degree in fashion design. One mentor was Tapio Wirkkala, the acclaimed Finnish designer of glassware, stoneware, and furniture. He supported Leino’s application to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and over two years there, she studied painting while reporting on the latest couture for Finnish magazines and newspapers.

At just five feet six, Leino was not an obvious candidate for modeling, but her broad shoulders, Nordic complexion, and high cheekbones attracted Madame Grès; the designer was soon outflanked by a young Karl Lagerfeld, who persuaded his boss, Pierre Balmain, to hire her. Soon Leino was walking for Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, and Yves Saint Laurent. Magazine editors came calling. So did photographers such as Claire Aho, a Finnish groundbreaker in color photography, and the erotically inclined Jean Clemmer, Dalí’s frequent collaborator. By 1960, Leino had enough money to buy a one-bedroom apartment in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and a farmhouse in Taormina, Sicily, her summer retreat.

It wasn’t all easy, though. The constant reminders to be vigilant about her weight led Leino, who already had a compulsive nature, to anorexia and bulimia. When Saint Laurent remarked that her hourglass figure was too “sexy,” or voluptuous, she resolved to become “the thinnest girl in Paris.” Her eating disorders sent her deeper into a depression that had begun with the death of the woman who raised her. (Her mother, who had not been married to her father, died when Leino was 6.)

She longed for an escape into art. Deluding herself into believing that a move to New York would cure her, she packed up her wardrobe and her easel and left Paris in 1964. With help from an unnamed patron—possibly Wirkkala—she sublet an Upper East Side apartment and began classes at the Art Students League on a scholarship. Her favorite teacher was the irascible (and still active) Larry Poons, then widely celebrated for his vibrant “dot” paintings. (In 2018, he reemerged as the poignant 80-year-old star of The Price of Everything, a documentary on HBO about the contemporary art market.) “All I remember about Iria,” he says, “is that hers was a very lively class, and that she was attractive but very quiet.”

Though barely conversant in English, Leino learned of artists colonizing raw, high-ceilinged lofts in SoHo and snagged a 4,000-square-foot space on the sixth floor of a cast-iron building that had no elevator. The rent was $650 a month—or $350 with the subsidy she received from a foundation. New York was Fun City then, and Leino was attending “tie-only” parties with the best of the art crowd, never as short of boyfriends as she was of money.

For years, her only income came from leasing her apartment in Paris—a collaboration with Marimekko for the use of her designs did not pan out—but still she continued to maintain that she didn’t need to exhibit or promote her paintings. “When the time is right,” she told Sihvonen, “people will come to me.” What money she had went into making her art, which at first entailed her staining unprimed canvas, Morris Louis– and Helen Frankenthaler–style, by pouring paint. Later on, she made what Falk describes as a thick gruel of powdered pigment and an acrylic emulsion that she slathered on canvas with a trowel, her hands, or a stucco applicator, sometimes embedding the surface with stones. (She also seems to have anticipated Gerhard Richter’s use of a squeegee.) Throughout, she grew increasingly withdrawn—something that, for Levine, seems supremely ironic. As he points out, “Iria repudiated the New York art world while living at its center.”

In her diaries, she noted every morsel of her vegetarian diet. “She loved Chinese food,” Sihvonen says. “Especially tofu. She didn’t drink coffee—only green tea or water. No alcohol or even fruit juice. But she always wore high heels, even at home. In her last years, she always wore black and purple, and I never saw her without makeup.” Nor did a day go by without the meditations she had learned from Gurudev. “She would repeat and repeat a chant, and then start painting and be in another world,” says Saasto, one of the rare people who have ever watched her work. She did continue to visit galleries and attract men—an affair with the married painter Stanley Boxer went on for years—but she never wed anyone. “I love to love,” she confessed, “but I’m saving my energy for painting.”

The fashion pendulum briefly swung her way again in 2000, when the streetwise Moroccan French designer Claude Sabbah opened a store in NoLIta selling avant-garde, made-to-order clothes that were catnip for hip-hop stars such as Lauryn Hill and Eve, as well as downtown style cognoscenti. The artist Laurie Simmons still has her silk camouflage suit overlaid with fishnet. “My first-ever piece of couture!” she declares.

“Iria came to the opening of Da House of Sabbah,” the designer says. “I felt blessed! She was very modern, even at her age—68—and was not only a friend but a muse who wore many outfits of mine.” When he asked her to return to the catwalk for a Fashion Week show of young designers, she did not hesitate to don the dramatic black satin and silk spandex ensemble he’d made for her: voluminous harem pants, a boatneck blouse, a signature do-rag cap—and, of course, spike-heeled black boots. “It was quite shocking to be back on the stage after all these years,” she remarked in a journal recovered by Falk. “But my love to be the center of attention on the stage has not disappeared.”

Sihvonen says that Leino hoped Sabbah would revive her modeling career and felt abandoned when he returned to Paris in 2004. “An angel of integrity” is the way he remembers Leino. “A person gifted to life! I hope she gets the recognition she deserves.”