1. Leonor Fini was an Argentine-Italian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful and erotic women.
24 Facts About Leonor Fini
1. 2.
Leonor Fini was raised there and was expelled from various schools for being rebellious.
3.
Leonor Fini moved to Milan at the age of 17 and a gallery in Trieste exhibited one of her paintings that year.
4.
Leonor Fini thereafter received a commission to paint portraits from dignitaries in Milan where she had her first one-woman show at the Galerie Barbaroux in 1929.
5.
Leonor Fini moved to Paris in 1931 when she was 24.
6.
Leonor Fini came to know Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, and Salvador Dali.
7.
Leonor Fini traveled Europe by car with Mandiargues and Cartier-Bresson where Cartier-Bresson took a photograph, one of his best known, of her naked in a pool with a shaved pubis.
8.
Leonor Fini had no formal artistic training, but grew up surrounded by the Renaissance and Mannerist styles of Italy.
9.
Leonor Fini was included in Peggy Guggenheim's 1943 show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York.
10.
Leonor Fini worked for Elsa Schiaparelli in the late thirties and early forties and designed the bottle for the perfume "Shocking", basing the shape on Mae West's torso.
11.
Leonor Fini networked into theatre circles when she started taking on costume design projects in the 1930s as a source of extra income.
12.
In 1949, Frederick Ashton choreographed a ballet she had conceptualized, Le Reve de Leonor, with music by Benjamin Britten, and Fini designed the hybrid human-animal costumes for it as well.
13.
In 1959, Leonor Fini made a fairy tale-inspired painting called Les Sorcieres for the Mexican actress, Maria Felix.
14.
Leonor Fini designed the costumes for two films: Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet and John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death.
15.
Leonor Fini painted portraits of Jean Genet, Anna Magnani, Jacques Audiberti, Alida Valli, Jean Schlumberger and Suzanne Flon as well as many other celebrities and wealthy visitors to Paris.
16.
Leonor Fini's friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris.
17.
Leonor Fini illustrated many works of classic authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers.
18.
Leonor Fini was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published.
19.
Leonor Fini was openly bisexual and lived in a long-term polyamorous relationship.
20.
Leonor Fini married once, for a brief period, to Federico Veneziani.
21.
Leonor Fini met the Polish writer Konstanty Jelenski, known as Kot in Rome in January 1952.
22.
Leonor Fini was delighted to discover that he was the illegitimate half-brother of Sforzino Sforza, who had been one of her favorite lovers.
23.
Leonor Fini later employed an assistant to join the household, which he described as "a little bit of prison and a lot of theatre".
24.
In 2018, Leonor Fini was the subject of a short documentary, Gloria's Call by Cheri Gaulke.