Leonor Fini (1906–1995)
While most women in the Surrealist circle were relegated to the idealized position of muse or the passive position of model, Leonor Fini was a vital creative force in the movement for many decades. Powerful images of women dominate her dreamscapes, but she is also notable for producing, in 1942, what has been called the first erotic male nude ever painted by a woman.
Born on August 30, 1907 in Buenos Aires, and raised in Trieste, on the Italian–Slovenian border, an ocular disease in her adolescence forced Fini to wear bandages over both eyes, and after recovering her vision she resolved to become an artist. In Paris, she came to know de Chirico, Picasso, and Dalí and was often seen and photographed in cafe society dressed in men's clothes or in nothing but white boots and a feathered cape. She participated in Peggy Guggenheim's watershed Exhibition by 31 Women alongside such artists as Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Louise Nevelson, Dorothea Tanning, and Maria de Silva—all of them still in their twenties. When she died on January 18, 1996, leaving behind a pair of live-in lovers and a clowder of Persian cats, her obituary in the Independent began, “In the 17th century, Leonor Fini would have been burnt as a witch.”