LEONOR FINI

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1907 — Paris, France, 1996

Leonor Fini stands as a fiercely independent visionary whose work both intersected with and exceeded the bounds of Surrealism. Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Trieste, Italy after her mother fled an oppressive marriage in which custody battles regularly forced the pair to disguise themselves in public, her early life was shaped by acts of resistance and reinvention that would prove foundational. Largely self-taught, she developed a visual language informed by the Flemish Masters, Symbolism, and psychoanalysis before relocating to Paris in 1931 at the advice of Giorgio de Chirico. There she moved within influential intellectual and artistic circles while refusing the formal membership of Breton's group, asserting her independence as both an artistic and political stance. As Artforum's Cassie Packard has observed, "For Fini, art and life were inextricable, knit together by an abiding interest in the performance of self, nonnormative conceptions of gender and sexuality, and transformation."

Her work is populated by sphinxes, hybrid beings, and commanding female figures,  reimagining myth and transformation through female agency. Her inclusion in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (MoMA, 1936) positioned her at the movement's center, even as she refused its orthodoxies. The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes (1941), now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, overturns traditional gender hierarchies, presenting women as sovereign and enigmatic; Guggenheim acquired the piece in 1942 and exhibited it in Exhibition by 31 Women (1943), where it became one of the show's most discussed works. From the mid-1940s onward she extended her inquiry into costume and performance, designing sets and costumes for ballet, opera, and film, including the first production of Roland Petit's Ballet de Paris in 1948.

Fini's critical recovery has accelerated substantially in recent years. The 2021 publication of the first complete Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings (Overstreet and Zukerman, Scheidegger & Spiess) catalogued over 1,100 canvases. Her personal papers are now held at Yale University's Beinecke Library. In 2022 she was prominently featured in The Witch's Cradle section of the Venice Biennale's The Milk of Dreams; Kasmin Gallery mounted a major survey in 2023; and Lévy Gorvy Dayan presented the first large ensemble of her paintings in London since 1967 in 2025. Her painting, Femme En Armure (Woman in Armor I) (1938), was included in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25) and 31 Mulheres at MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025). The first comprehensive retrospective devoted to Fini in Germany, organized by the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in collaboration with the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris opens in Frankfurt on 23 October 2026, runs through 21 February 2027, and subsequently travels to Paris. 

Work by Leonor Fini is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Fini's contributions in the record of art history.