NEW YORK, NY.- 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 SoHo was $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 neighbors 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 organization to stay afloat.
Today, a 2,100-square-foot unit in the co-op rents for $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.
“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.
“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.
In 1978, the building on Greene Street went co-op, and the new owners sought to remove Leino, first by bribery and then by legal action. She told Barbara Rachko, an artist friend, that she refused a $1 million offer to relocate. “Where would I find something else this big?” she asked. Lawyers working pro bono fought off eviction in the Supreme Court of New York County.
“It’s interesting that she managed to be the lone holdout up to the end,” Rachko said.
Leino’s dog-bone stubbornness sometimes worked to her advantage, friends and admirers said, but it also made her prone to self-sabotage. Falk recalled a journal entry where she described famed art dealer Leo Castelli visiting the loft and complimenting one of her works composed of acrylic paint scraped off a hard surface and applied to the canvas like tattered skin.
“She was brusque,” Falk said. “She turned him off.”
Frame said, “She was protective of her creative space, of course. With her accent, she could sound very harsh.” He abruptly barked the word “No!” in demonstration.
Even close allies felt the chill of her insularity. Varpu Sihvonen, a Finnish journalist who met the artist in New York in the 1990s and is at work on a biography of her, recalled their meetings at the loft: “You would think if you were a good friend, you could just drop by, but no, you had to make an appointment. If you rang the doorbell and hadn’t made an appointment, she wouldn’t let you in.”
Once admitted, Sihvonen said she was confined by unspoken agreement to the kitchen. In all their years of friendship, she saw only two or three of Leino’s completed paintings and none that was in progress.
“That was the story of her life: Don’t let people in,” she said.
Rachko recalled things differently: “I saw her work all the time,” she said. “There was so much of it.” Out of compassion for Leino’s financial straits, Rachko bought a thickly encrusted canvas called “Fish” for $500.
For all her thriftiness, Leino did not totally lack resources. She owned a small, walk-up apartment in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and a crumbling farmhouse with a sea view in the Sicilian town of Taormina.
Six years ago, she met Robert Alan Saasto, a Finnish American lawyer whose own mother had been a painter. She authorized him to sell her Paris home for about $650,000 and set up a trust with the proceeds. (The Italian property had long been taken over by squatters and remains embroiled in a legal dispute.)
“She refused to touch any of the trust money,” Saasto recalled. Neither would she accept the mattress he wanted to buy to replace the pancake-thin one on her loft bed, despite her frequent complaints about back pain. At this point, she was well in her 80s.
Leino also rejected offers to help market her paintings, Saasto said, although she gave him permission to use the funds to catalog, clean and prepare them for sale after her death.
According to Saasto, Leino left most of her estate, including any revenue that came from the sale of her art, to the Integral Yoga Society and its sister organization, Yogaville, an ashram founded by Swami Satchidananda in Virginia.
Radha Metro-Midkiff, executive director of the Integral Yoga Institute, said, “It’s not unusual for this to happen where Swami Satchidananda made such a huge impact on someone’s life they make some sort of bequest.”
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 $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.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
