User:Seth Starkadder

Fiore De Henriquez, was one of the most respected and prolific figures in post-war sculpture; she ranged from portrait busts to crucifixions and pietas, and from semi-abstract and mythical figures to life-sized statues and monumental public commissions.

Fiore de Henriquez's work revealed an intuitive grasp of plastic form and a keen eye for expression and character, yet she herself remained something of an enigma, and it was only in the last few years that she revealed to the writer Jan Marsh (whose biography of Fiore de Henriquez is to be published shortly), that she was, in fact, a hermaphrodite. Brought up as a girl in pre-war Italy, Fiore discovered her androgyny at puberty when, as well as beginning menstruation and developing breasts, she discovered that she also had male genitalia. She kept this secret from family and friends and, though she always felt more male than female (she was attracted to women, never to men), she always referred to herself as a "sculptress", channelling her prodigious energies into her art.

She saw the creative process as a metaphor for her own duality: "I begin to embrace a piece of clay; it is soft and pliable, all feminine," she told Jan Marsh. "Then it goes hard, terracotta, and is cast in plaster, pure gesso, virile and rigid, that I carve with a knife. Next it is made all feminine in wax, all pliable once more, to be caressed and stroked. Then masculine again in bronze, hard and solid. All the time, you must think: will you leave something feminine, or make it more masculine; how will you shape and finish it?"

It was possibly this struggle between the warring sides of her nature that gave Fiore de Henriquez's art its vitality and extraordinary diversity.

Even in portrait sculpture, she could range from craggy vividness - as in her bust of Augustus John - to classical sensitivity - as in her head of Odette Churchill.

Some found her androgyny repellent - there were not very subtly coded references in the press to her "mannish" appearance, "broad shoulders", "beetling eyebrows", and "hefty shoes". But others found her compelling and she formed deep friendships with people of both sexes.

One to come under her spell was the painter Augustus John, who met her at a London dinner party in the early 1950s. "Her dark, savage but eminently attractive features under a mop of coal-black hair, might have deserved the epithet 'saturnine'," John recalled, "but for the geniality and high spirits which animated her flashing Adriatic eyes. Her stalwart legs were encased in black velvet breeches ornamented with pearl buttons, with white stockings and buckled shoes. A regular Macaroni!"

They became great friends and she encouraged him to try his hand at sculpting. "A whole new phase in my history opened up," he recalled. "Provided by Fiore with everything I needed, I set to work to produce a head of W B Yeats from memory. I bless the day I met Fiore."

Although she executed thousands of commissions, Fiore de Henriquez, possibly out of fear of the hostility which her appearance often provoked, never tried to establish a reputation and suffered from critical neglect. It was only in later life that she began to exhibit regularly and attracted some of the recognition that was her due.

Maria Fiore de Henriquez was born at Trieste on June 20 1921 into a family of complex ancestry. On her father's side she was descended from Spanish noblemen of the Habsburg court in Vienna; her grandfather and great uncles had served as vice-admirals in the Austro-Hungarian navy. Her mother was of Turkish-Russian origin.

It was always clear that Fiore was different. She adored her father and elder brother, but her mother was always angry with her. A few minutes after Fiore was born, she thrust her into cold water to see if she would survive. She insisted on dressing her in frocks and ribbons, which Fiore detested. "Why have you such a beautiful daughter," her mother asked Margot Fonteyn's mother, "when I have this monster?"

As a child in Mussolini's Italy, Fiore joined the Fascist youth movement, becoming leader of its girls' gymnastic team. But in 1935 her beloved father was denounced as an anti-fascist and sent into internal exile for refusing to Italianise his name.

Fiore had no particular interest in art but, while studying languages and philosophy in Venice, she saw someone working in clay and found her vocation.

After briefly studying at the Accademia under Arturo Martini, she moved during the War to the Dolomite resort of Cortona d'Ampezzo. There she began to sculpt for some of the wealthier residents and did clandestine work helping partisans and Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi occupation. Towards the end of the war she was captured and interrogated by the occupying Nazi forces, but managed to escape by jumping from the window of an upstairs lavatory.

After the war, Fiore de Henriquez moved to Florence where she became studio assistant to the sculptor Antonio Berti, who helped her to arrange her first exhibition, in 1947. It was a sell-out. She then moved south to Positano on the Amalfi coast, where the wheelchair-bound German painter Kurt Kramer asked her to marry him. She was fond of him and briefly considered the matter before dismissing it as impossible.

In 1949 she won her first major public commission, for the main square of Salerno. But when her identity was revealed at the unveiling, rival artists conspired to destroy her figure because she was a woman and an outsider. Deeply upset, she decided to move to London.

Her first commission, a portrait of the Royal sculptor Sir William Reid Dick, brought her immediate recognition at the Royal Academy - she had two heads in the 1950 summer show - and in 1951 Jacob Epstein invited her to create three enormous figures for the Festival of Britain, for which she negotiated a then astronomical fee of £4,000. Meanwhile society hostesses with bohemian tastes competed to secure her exotic presence at their tables.

From then on she was deluged with commissions - in 1954, she was reported to have completed no fewer than 500 portrait busts in four years. Her sitters included the Queen Mother, Odette Churchill, Alicia Markova, Laurence Olivier, Igor Stravinsky Peter Ustinov and Margot Fonteyn. "For a new person I always wear a skirt when I visit their homes for the first time," she explained. "Afterwards they understand me better in trousers." She took British citizenship in 1957.

In 1955 she travelled to America to work with the architect Claude Phillimore on an abortive design for a civic centre in Hollywood for the millionaire Huntingdon Hartford. From then on she travelled widely, flitting between London, Italy, Japan Hong Kong and America, where, for 20 years, she undertook an annual two-month tour demonstrating her art (in the early days, Jennifer Paterson of Two Fat Ladies worked as her administrative assistant).

In 1963 she was commissioned to do a bust of President Kennedy, a project which had to be completed posthumously from photographs. Later commissions included 20 life-sized bronzes of racehorses and their jockeys for a race course in New York.

American modernism inspired her to experiment with looser forms and she developed new motifs, often involving conjoined figures which seemed to represent the duality of her nature. In the early 1960s she found a new mentor in the cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, whom she introduced to the bronze foundries of Pietrasanta, in Italy.

It was on a visit to Italy in 1968 that she discovered and later bought the ruined hamlet of Peralta, north of Lucca, which became her base. She restored the buildings, creating an haven where artists could come to write, sculpt or simply walk in the hills.

But during the mid-1960s, she suffered some kind of mental breakdown after undergoing surgery to remove her male reproductive organs. While physiologically the operation was a success, it did nothing to remove her feelings of duality, and she produced a series of tortured pieces inspired by mythological creatures - half beast, half human.

But she eventually recovered and in 1985 she built a tower in Peralta to celebrate its resurrection, and possibly her own recovery.