Fini, Leonor, 1908-1996

Leonor Fini; August 30, 1907, Buenos Aires, Argentina; January 18, 1996, Paris, France; Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she was raised in Trieste, Italy; she moved to Milan at the age of 17, and then to Paris, in either 1931 or 1932; here, she became acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, who influenced 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; Milan, where she had her first one-woman show at the Galerie Barbaroux in 1929; Her first major exhibition was in 1936 in New York at Julian Levy Gallery; In 1943, Fini was included in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York; 1949 Frederick Ashton choreographed a ballet conceptualized by Fini, "Le Rêve de Leonor" (“Leonor's Dream") with music by Benjamin Britten; She painted portraits of Jean Genet, Anna Magnani, Jacques Audiberti, Alida Valli, Jean Schlumberger (jewelry designer) and Suzanne Flon as well as many other celebrities and wealthy visitors to Paris. While working for Elsa Schiaparelli she designed the bottle for the perfume "Shocking", which became the top selling perfume for the House of Schiaparelli and was the acknowledged inspiration for Jean-Paul Gaultier's later torso-shaped bottles; She also designed the costumes for two films, Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet (1954) and John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death (1968); In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. Leonor Fini provided illustrations to books by Lise Deharme, the first being Le Poids d’un oiseau in 1955 and Oh! Violette ou la Politesse des Végétaux in 1969;