Leonor Fini 1907-1996

Born in Buenos Aires to Italian parents, Leonor Fini quickly moved to Trieste, Italy, where her mother fled her oppressive father within eighteen months of Fini's birth. Following a kidnapping attempt orchestrated by her father, Fini began disguising as a boy in public, birthing a lifelong fascination with masquerade and an aura of mystique that would later become a touchstone of her artistic practice. In her teenage years, Fini suffered from an illness which left her eyes bandaged for two months, catalyzing the evolution of an artistic lexicon drawn from dreams, the imagination, and the human psyche. With no formal training, Fini soon began exhibiting in group exhibitions in Trieste and Milan, where she discovered the Italian Mannerists. She began receiving commissions for portraits at this time, a genre for which Fini would later become renowned with examples depicting such artists, writers, and public figures as Leonora Carrington, Lady Diana Cooper, Jean Genet, Meret Oppenheim, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues, among many others. 

In 1931, Fini moved to Paris at the advice of the artist Giorgio de Chirico, who introduced her to the Surrealists. Disavowing the misogyny of the group's leader, André Breton, Fini boldly rejected an invitation to formally join the Surrealist group, though she continued to exhibit and socialize with such figures as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Georges Bataille, Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Meret Oppenheim, among many others. Fini's first solo exhibition in Paris was mounted in 1932 at the Galerie Bonjean, where Christian Dior then served as director. Her work soon rose to prominence following her inclusion in the pivotal exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1936, the same year she began exhibiting with the New York-based gallerist and champion of Surrealist art Julien Levy. Fini's creative output had already begun to surpass the boundaries of the visual arts by this time, and she notably designed the bottle and packaging of Elsa Schiaparelli's perfume called Shocking in 1937. Fini's extravagant and eccentric dresses embellished with masks and ripped clothing, often captured in photographs by Lee Miller and Dora Maar, would also launch Fini into a well-recognized fashion icon. 

On the eve of World War II in Paris, Fini curated an exhibition of Surrealist furniture for the first gallery owned by her friend Leo Castelli, who would become a leading dealer of the twentieth century. During the German occupation of Paris, she fled to southwestern France with Salvador and Gala Dalí, later moving to Monte Carlo and eventually Rome after that city's liberation. Fini would continue to exhibit internationally during the war, including in a landmark 1943 exhibition showcasing only women artists, 31 Women, organized by Peggy Guggenheim at her New York gallery Art of This Century. After the war, Fini eventually returned to Paris. She would live and work between that city and Saint-Dyé-sur-Loire for the remainder of her life.

In the postwar years, Fini continued to paint as well as design sets and costumes for ballet, theater, and film. She created designs for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine's ballet Palaise de Crystal (now titled Symphony in C, 1947), Roland Petit's Les Demoiselles de la Nuit (1948), for Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, and for over seventy productions at Paris theaters between 1946 and 1969 including Jean Genet's The Maids and The Balcony. She also designed and created costumes for films including Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet (1954), Federico Fellini's 8 ½ (1963), and John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death (1969). Fini would come to illustrate about fifty books, including the works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Gérard de Nerval, and Edgar Allan Poe.

 Museum exhibitions & collections

In her lifetime, Fini was the subject of retrospective exhibitions in Belgium (1965), Italy (1983), Japan (1972-73, 1985-86), and France (1986). Additional retrospectives were staged posthumously at institutions in Italy (2005, 2009), Japan (2005), Germany (1997-98), and Sweden (2014), and the artist's first U.S. museum survey was staged at New York's Museum of Sex from 2018 until 2019, followed by solo exhibition at the Lilley Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Reno in 2021. In 2021 and 2022, her work was included in the expansive exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern in London. In 2022, Fini was prominently included in The Witch's Cradle, one of five historical sections embedded within The Milk of Dreams, the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale. 

Examples of Fini's works can be found in esteemed collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Miyazaki Prefectural Art Museum, Japan; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; the Musée de Grenoble, France; Museo Revoltella, Trieste, Italy; the Museum of Modern Art, Brussels; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and Tate Modern, London, among others.

A catalogue raisonné of the artist's oil paintings was published in 2021, authored by Fini experts Richard Overstreet and Neil Zukerman. An authoritative biography by art historian Peter Webb was published in 2007 (translated to English in 2009), and the artist's personal papers and library, previously housed in the Leonor Fini Archives directed by Overstreet in Paris, are now held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.