de Henriquez

Fiore was born in Trieste on 20 June 1921. She died at Peralta in June 2004.

From 1939 to 1942, she studied at the Academy of Art in Venice. In 1943–45, she worked with the medium of wood at Cortina d’Ampezzo. During this period, she helped the Partisans in the Dolomites.

She went to live in Positano in 1948. She had her first major commission – a monument in bronze of Don Giovanni Cuomo for the town of Salerno. It was blown up on the day of its inauguration, and, in 1949, disgusted by this treatment, Fiore left Italy for England.

In 1951–52 Fiore was invited by the Royal Academy in London to do three statues (triple life size) for the Festival of Britain. In 1953, she became a British citizen – her application had the backing of many prominent people.

From 1954 to 1960, she was commissioned by Huntington Hartford to become involved in an architectural project for a cultural centre in Beverly Hills (USA). During this time, she also realised a considerable amount of work in the US, England and Italy.

From 1955 to 1975, she spent several months each year touring the United States and Canada, giving lectures around the theme “In love with Clay”.

In 1961, she met Jacques Lipchitz in New York and worked with him for several years. She introduced him to Tuscany, and he came to live at the Villa Bosio in Camaiore.

In 1966, Fiore fell in love with Peralta in the hills of Tuscany – a hamlet that was nearly entirely in ruins and that dates back to Etruscan times. She managed to buy the ruins and gradually restored them over the following fifteen years. Her idea was to create a haven where artists could come and work in beautiful, tranquil surroundings.

Fiore has much work in the States, where she has patrons in New York, Chicago and Florida. One of her large works is in Kips Bay Plaza, New York – commissioned by the architect Pei.

She worked extensively in Japan and Hong Kong in the 1980s, sculpting many portraits of the Japanese nobility and also a very large bust of Yoshida, Prime Minister of Japan after the Second World War. She has a bust of Brahms in a street in the centre of Tokyo, and a full life-size bronze of Strauss in Osaka.

Fiore has sculpted many dolphins. A life-size group of three are on the property of Brooks McCormack near Chicago; there are four life-size dolphins either side of the steps of the Aberdeen Nautical Club in Hong Kong. In Geneva, two of Fiore’s dolphins are in the fountain in front of the OMPI Foundation building.

From 1948 to her death in 2004, Fiore made in the region of four thousand portraits! Among them: Augustus John (1952), Margot Fonteyn (1956), Peter Ustinov (1953), Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (1958), Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (1962), a full statue of him in his desert uniform, commissioned by the Royal Academy and now in a square in Birmingham. She sculpted Ruskin Spear for the RA…

Her portrait of John F. Kennedy was commissioned by the Fairleigh Dickinson University of New Jersey in 1963. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (1987/88) has her portrait aboard the Ark Royal, and also in a hospital of which she was patron in the north of England. In the early 1990s, Sir Reresby Sitwell, Dr Arpad Bogsch and Pierre Braillard were amongst those sculpted. The list goes on and on.

Some of Fiore’s work is housed in a permanent museum at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, seat of the Sitwell family. The museum was created in 1993 and was later visited and officially opened by Prince Charles.

On one of the lawns in the gardens of Renishaw is her large “Oceanic Flower” (1994) in travertine marble, which was generously donated to the Museum by one of Fiore’s patrons. Her Tree of Life (bronze) and Amaryllis, the life-size portrait of Amaryllis Fleming, also in bronze, stand in the Old Stable Yard.

Richard Whymark, award-winning director, filmed a documentary about Fiore: fioredocumentary.com

Fiore’s website: fioredehenriquez.net