A Finnish artist and the apartment and paintings she left behind
WHEN Iria Leino, a Finnish-born painter, died at 89, the rent on her 4,000-square-foot loft in a former knitting factory in South of Houston Street (SoHo) was US$650 a month.
Leino lived in the same building complex from 1966 until her death of leukemia in 2022. She moved to 133 Greene St in 1966, when the district was a rubbly artists refuge. Later, she relocated to a sixth-floor unit in the building next door. (Both cast-iron structures were combined into a single co-op, 133-137 Greene St, in the late 1970s. The entrance – and current address – is at 135 Greene St.)
As high-fashion boutiques sprouted around her and her neighbours bought and renovated some of the most expensive property in the city, she collected the refunds from cans and bottles and later relied on subsidies from a charitable organisation to stay afloat.
Today, a 2,100-square-foot unit in the co-op rents for US$12,500 per month. Leino was busy accumulating her own kind of treasure. At her death, she left more than 1,000 artworks that she had made over a half-century.
Both the artist and her works are now objects of wonder. On Wednesday, Harper’s Gallery, in Manhattan, will exhibit a small selection of Leino’s canvases. Peter Hastings Falk, an art historian and independent curator, who is managing the collection for the Iria Leino Trust, said, “We’re making the bold statement, which I think is true, that she’s the first woman abstract painter from Finland, in America.”
And the loft has attracted not just art dealers but documentary filmmakers and Finnish cultural officials entranced by its time-capsule quality.
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“When I walked into the apartment, it was like walking into the prime time of the New York art scene, when everyone was living in these illegal lofts in SoHo,” said Kati Laakso, executive director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. Visiting not long after Leino’s death, Laakso saw stacks of canvases filling the big, dusty rooms, and floors strewed with papers. An entire room held racks of clothing, including cotton print Marimekko dresses from the 1960s. And shoes. So many shoes.
“It was a mind blow,” Laakso said.
Leino’s loft was a single raw room that she partitioned into a maze, recounted Corbin Frame, who worked periodically as her assistant in the 1980s and ’90s. Apart from the walk-in closet and a small bedroom with a crudely constructed elevated bed, every space was dedicated to painting.
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“The kitchen had just a table and two chairs,” he said, as well as the only sink in the unit. “When she had people over to do studio visits, she would pull out the chairs and serve Champagne, so the whole focus was artwork.”
Despite this zeal, Leino participated in few gallery exhibitions in her lifetime and sold little of her work. Her biggest successes came from an entirely different vocation.
Born Taiteilija Irja Leino in 1932, she was raised by a family friend after her mother died in 1938. As a young woman, she studied art and fashion design in Finland, then moved to Paris, where she had received a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and where she also worked as a fashion journalist and model.
By the 1950s, she had become a modeling sensation, said Falk, who has written about Leino for his online publication Discoveries in American Art. She walked the runways for couture houses including Pierre Balmain and Christian Dior, and was known for wearing a swooping hairstyle called the nouvelle vague, or new wave, a sassy reference to the French art film movement. When the name she used, Irja, was misspelled in a modeling session, she appropriated the error and became Iria.
Photos show a stunning, wide-cheeked blond with an attitude. In 1967, she appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”
According to Falk, Leino moved to New York in 1964 and switched careers after developing a chronic eating disorder.
“Her journals show that she documented every calorie that entered her body: date, time of day, liquid or solid,” he said.
She also became an ardent Buddhist, who followed the teachings of Swami Satchidananda Saraswati, founder of the Integral Yoga Institute in Manhattan.
Her artworks represent a head-spinning mix of styles and media. Some canvases are fluttery abstractions reminiscent of the artist Larry Poons, with whom she studied at the Art Students League in New York. Some are covered in gobs of plasticky paint bearing the swipe marks of her fingers. Some are portraits of Swami Satchidananda, who was one of her rare figurative subjects. (She also executed a nonrepresentational series called “Buddhist Rain” and was known to paint while chanting mantras.) Some are the size of baby whales. Stuck to one notable canvas, called “Homecoming (After),” are two pairs of high-heeled shoes and a few whiskey bottles.
As for the loft, it continues to bear Leino’s imprint and her hundreds of pictures, some so large that they will have to be removed from their stretchers and rolled up to be carried away. The unit can now be sold, although the lawyer representing the building’s owners declined to disclose when it will be put on the market or what the asking price will be. (The median listing price of a home in SoHo as of June was US$4.8 million, according to Realtor.com.)
Joshua Charow, a photographer who is the author of the book “Loft Law: The Last of New York City’s Artist Lofts,” said his best guess is that a few hundred of these properties remain, remnants of a policy from the charmed early ’80s. “It’s important to remember that this is not just a part of New York City’s past but its present,” he said. “These artists are still here; they’re still creating amazing works.” NYTIMES
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