Leonor Fini

(Argentine/Italian, 1907–1996)

Leonor Fini was an Argentine-Italian painter who spent much of her artistic career in France. Associated with the Surrealist movement, Fini’s self-portraits and mythological paintings focused on eroticism and dreams. “Paintings, like dreams, have a life of their own and I have always painted very much the way I dream,” she once said. Born Eleanora Fini on August 30, 1907 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she moved with her mother to Trieste in Italy when she was still an infant. Growing up, Fini took an interest in morbid subject matter and often drew cadavers at the local morgue. Though she had no formal artistic training, Fini studied the works of the Italian Mannerist painters and their use of elongated forms. In 1931, the artist moved to Paris where she befriended Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington. Fini’s eccentric lifestyle of cross dressing, carrying on homosexual relationships, and eating dinner with her 23 cats, continued throughout the decades. She notably designed the costumes for Federico Fellini’s film 8 ½ in 1963, and was the subject of many photographs and poems during her lifetime. Fini died on January 18, 1996 in Paris, France. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London, among others.