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Leonor Fini, painter, printmaker, designer, illustrator, and author, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 30, 1907, to Italian and Argentine parents. As a child, her mother fled with her to Trieste, Italy where she grew up. Fini had no formal art training as a child but her passion to paint and draw took her to Madrid where she was included in a group exhibition in 1929. In 1931, she moved to Paris and quickly established herself as an artist whose peers included Surrealists Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico. She is considered to be one of the few women to break into the French male-dominated Surrealist movement. Mainly autodidactic in her pursuit of the arts, she experimented with painting and printmaking. In the 1930s, she worked alongside many established European artists at Stanley William Hayter's experimental workshop Atelier 17.

Fini's extensive oeuvre includes graphic design, furniture design, and illustration. In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. She was the costume de

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Leonor Fini

Born in Argentina to Italian parents, at the age of two Leonor Fini fled with her mother to the Italian city of Trieste, escaping her oppressive father. Over the years he would try to bring her back to Argentina, forcing Fini to disguise herself as a boy, sowing the seeds of her masquerades and gender reversals. In the 1930s she met artist Giorgio de Chirico, who would advise her to move to Paris and introduce her to the Surrealists; yet, disavow- ing André Breton’s traditional view of women, she rejected the invitation to officially join the group. Fini illustrated several famous books, worked for Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and designed costumes for ballet, theatre, and film. The artist was interested in the macabre, a pursuit that is translated into a sensual encounter with the momentari- ly still body of Nico Papatakis in L’Alcôve (1941). Fini, perched on the side of the bed, admires the body of the androgynous curved male nude chastely lounging in a boudoir framed by voluptuous textured drapery. Exchanging roles, the artist destabilises social mores as

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Leonor Fini Argentinian, 1907-1996

A painting is something like a spectacle, a theater piece in which each figure lives out her part.
—Leonor Fini

The iconoclastic Leonor Fini was arguably the most ferociously and heroically independent woman artist of the 20th century. Fini herself never accepted the label of "woman artist," and likewise, never considered herself a Surrealist. She never sacrificed her independence to André Breton, the leader of the movement, and abhorred his misogynist views. Nonetheless, her works have been included in nearly every major Surrealism exhibition from 1936 to present. Fini was born in Argentina in 1907. Her mother spirited her away to her Italian homeland of Trieste. For the first seven years of her life, Fini was disguised as a boy whenever she left home to foil the kidnap attempts of her father. Raised by intelligent women and artistic personalities, it was not long before she decided to become an artist. By the time she relocated to Paris in 1931, she was already an intimate of Giorgio de Chirico and his circle.