Leonor Fini

Leonor Fini was born in Buenos Aires. Her mother fled from her violent husband with the baby to Trieste in Italy, where Leonor grew up; to protect her from being kidnapped by her father, she was sometimes dressed as a boy. She taught herself to paint and moved to Paris in 1931.

There she became close to the Surrealists, without ever joining the group. Her paintings show powerful, self-confident women, sphinxes, androgynous figures and dreamlike scenes in which the traditional roles of men and women are reversed. She also designed costumes and sets for the theatre and ballet, illustrated books and wrote novels.

Fini rejected marriage and conventional roles. For decades she lived in Paris with two men, the Italian diplomat and painter Stanislao Lepri and the Polish writer Konstanty Jeleński – and with many cats. Her art, with its play on gender and desire, has made her a figure of reference for feminist and queer art history, and she is described as bisexual.

She died in Paris in 1996, aged 88.