Leonor Fini

Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini, 1936
Born	(1907-08-30)August 30, 1907 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died	January 18, 1996(1996-01-18) (aged 88)
Nationality	Argentine
Known for	Painting Illustration Writing
Movement	Surrealism

Leonor Fini (1907 – 1996) was an Argentine surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she was raised in Trieste, Italy, her mother's home city. Custody battles often involved Fini and her mother in sudden flights and disguises. She moved to Milan at the age of 17, and then to Paris, in either 1931 or 1932. There, she became acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, who inspired much of her work. She also came to know Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and Salvador Dalí. She traveled Europe by car with Mandiargues and Cartier-Bresson where she was photographed nude in a swimming pool by Cartier-Bresson. The photograph of Fini sold in 2007 for $305,000 - the highest price paid at auction for one of his works to that date.

Fini had no formal artistic training. Her first major exhibition was in 1939 in New York at Julian Levy’s Gallery. Fini was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, and outlived most of her artist peers. Surrealist artists in France became very interested in her once she began setting herself up as an artist, and came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although some leave her out (interestingly enough she did not consider herself a surrealist). In 1949 Frederick Ashton choreographed a ballet conceptualized by Fini, "Le Rêve de Leonor" (“Leonor's Dream") with music by Benjamin Britten. In London, she exhibited at the Kaplan gallery in 1960 and at the Hanover Gallery in 1967. In the summer of 1986 there was a retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris that drew in more than 5,000 people a day. It featured over 260 works in a variety of media. A tribute to the many artistic and creative avenues that her career took throughout her lifetime, there were 100+ watercolors and drawings, around 80 theatre/costume designs, and about 70 paintings, 5 masks, etc. Many of her paintings featured women in positions of power; an example of this is the painting La Bout du Monde where a female figure is submerged in water up to her breasts with human and animal skulls surrounding her. Madonna used the imagery in her video, "Bedtime Story" in 2006. In the spring of 1987 she had an exhibition at London’s Editions Graphique’s gallery. Fini was also featured in an exhibition entitled “Women, Surrealism, and Self-representation” at the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art in 1999.