I’m in love with Leonor Fini

At the ground floor of Palazzo Reale, Milan pays long-overdue homage to one of the most complex, courageous, and captivating figures of twentieth-century art: Leonor Fini. For those who know her, this exhibition is a celebration. For those discovering her for the first time — and I’m from this latter category — I promise it will be a revelation.

I fell in love with Leonor Fini not only for her striking imagery and theatrical mastery, but because she remains, still today, a radically underappreciated voice in the canon of modern art. Overshadowed by the dominant narratives of Surrealism—largely male, often narrow—Fini carved out a space that was defiantly her own: that of a fierce and fantastically unbound feminism. Her universe is one of powerful women, hybrid beings, sensual ambiguity, and unapologetic self-possession. In this sense, the exhibition is not just a retrospective; it is a necessary act of recognition. In a world still negotiating the terms of gender, identity, and representation, Fini’s work speaks with startling prescience. Her rejection of binaries, her fluid approach to gender, her portrayal of women not as muses or victims but as queens, witches, and sphinxes—all these resonate today with renewed urgency. Long before “non-binary” entered the mainstream vocabulary, Fini had already imagined a world where identity is performance, costume, mask—and ultimately, freedom. Leonor Fini does not need to be reimagined for our times. Our times are finally catching up to her.

And it feels profoundly right that this exhibition is finally hosted in Italy, a country so deeply entwined with her life and career: born in Buenos Aires, raised in Trieste, and artistically formed in Paris, Fini is a truly transnational figure—her identity, much like her art, resists confinement. She did not belong to the Surrealists, although she exhibited with them. She did not conform to movements, lovers, or rules. She staged her life as an artwork, lived on her own terms, and painted with unmatched theatricality and depth.

As you walk through rooms filled with her visions—erotic, mythic, political, otherworldly—take the opportunity not only to appreciate her genius, but to question why it took us so long to look back. And let us ensure that this moment is not an isolated celebration, but the beginning of a broader rediscovery.

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The Sphinx — The Other Self

At the heart of Leonor Fini’s mythology lies the Sphinx—not as a riddle to be solved, but as a key to understanding the very essence of her art and persona. This majestic, winged creature—hybrid, transformative, and magnetic—transcends time and tradition. Its symbolic origins in Fini’s universe echo a sculpture of pink porphyry, transported from Egypt and now resting at the Castello di Miramare in Trieste, a city intimately tied to Fini’s own formative years.

But Fini’s Sphinx is more than a relic or an echo. She reinvents it as a liminal figure, caught between binaries—woman and man, beast and human, the known and the unknowable. The Sphinx becomes a totem of a feminine consciousness that requires no declaration, no validation. It simply exists, radiating quiet dominion.

As guardian of inner truths and secret instincts, this figure calls forth a deep, ancestral memory—a lost feminine power, not diminished but hidden, threaded through the warp of civilization, nature, and myth. In Fini’s hands, the Sphinx is not a question but an answer: to who we are when we are free of roles, free of masks. A mirror of multiplicity. A symbol of the self unbound.

Her orange-hued Sphinx is one of the four figures proposed as archetypical scenes—in the Jungian sense of the word—to understand Fini’s approach to reality. The other scenes are the theme of the sleeping youth—complemented by the astounding Divinité chatonienne guettant le sommeil d’un jeune homme—the mask or the disguise as a survival tool, and blindness—with reference to an episode of her youth in which she had to stay blindfolded in the dark for two months due to an infection.

They serve as an introduction, or a prelude, to the rest of the exhibition.

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In 1931, Leonor Fini moved to Paris—an act that would redefine her creative path. She left behind a naturalistic style to embrace one that was more experimental and deeply personal. Works like Maternité and her portrait series of André Pieyre de Mandiargues became early testaments to her fascination with defiance and transformation. In portraying Mandiargues in unconventional, often gender-fluid roles, Fini directly challenged traditional norms, both artistic and social. She revisited the Old Masters not to replicate but to subvert, drawing on their techniques to create radical new visions—such as Portrait of André Pieyre de Mandiargues in a Leopard Collar, where elegance masks rebellion and—if you don’t mind me saying—sheer queerness.

Paris brought her into the orbit of the Surrealists, whose intensity and ideas resonated with her own but whom she never fully joined. Fini approached them with curiosity and distance, intrigued yet unwilling to submit to their dogmas. She recognized their shared reverence for the visionary—echoes of Bosch, de Chirico, and Piero di Cosimo—but followed her own instincts. From 1935 onward, she began integrating unmistakably surrealist elements into her work, blending the eerie with the wondrous. Self-Portrait with Charlie Holt, for instance, conjures a theatrical intimacy wrapped in dreamlike menace.

Surrealism opened doors, especially to other women artists—Meret Oppenheim, the great Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Alice Rahon—and these connections deepened Fini’s exploration of female autonomy and inner power. Works like Self-Portrait with an Owl evoke an ancient femininity: the artist aligning herself with Athena, goddess of wisdom and strategy.

Despite her ambivalence toward the surrealist label, Fini participated in key moments of the movement, including the International Surrealist Exhibition in London (1936), where she unveiled L’Arme blanche—a haunting depiction of desire and danger, love and rage, all through a female lens. Fini’s vision of gender and sexuality was radically ahead of her time. Her art spoke of bisexuality and queerness, making the Surrealists uncomfortable. Yet she remained close to some of its great names—Max Ernst, Victor Brauner—who, in turn, influenced her lifelong inquiry into magic, alchemy, and the arcane.

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Second World War: body, death, and beauty

To understand how the surrounding atmosphere influenced Leonor Fini, take for instance a key work from this period, Le Bout du monde (The Edge of the World), in which the artist envisions herself as the sole survivor in an apocalyptic landscape, a sovereign figure amidst a world of living skulls sprouting bulbs—surreal remnants of a once-living earth.

These post-catastrophic visions mark a striking shift in her work. In paintings like L’Ombrelle (The Parasol), Fini transforms delicate objects of elegance into brittle, crystalline ruins, alluding to fragility beneath sophistication. Her preoccupation with death and transformation was catalyzed by a stay on the island of Giglio with Stanislao Lepri, where she collected bones and organic matter along the shore, turning them into mysterious hybrid beings—like Sphinx Regina, La Racine aux coquilles d’oeufs (The Root with Eggshells), Visage, and La Grande Racine (The Great Root).

These works, rendered with exquisite technique, echo the baroque tradition of vanitas and are laden with autobiographical symbols—like the hollow egg in L’Escalier dans la tour (The Staircase in the Tower), a haunting emblem of emptiness and memory.

Fini’s thought was deeply influenced by Georges Bataille and Mario Praz, whose writings on eroticism, death, and the diabolical became touchstones. She illustrated key texts such as Bataille’s Tears of Eros and Praz’s The Flesh, Death and the Devil in Romantic Literature, echoing their dark fascination with the body and its limits. Among the most emblematic works of this era is Méphisto (Ange-Diable) (Mephisto [Angel-Devil])—a figure suspended between sacred and profane, embodying Fini’s vision of the divine and demonic in perpetual dialogue.

These images are neither solely morbid nor merely symbolic. They express a deeply sensual and poetic confrontation with mortality, culminating in works like Qui est-ce? (Who Is It?), a ghostly meditation on loss and the unknowable. For Fini, death is never just an end—it is a space of ritual, ambiguity, and dark allure, and she navigates it with both lucid sorrow and baroque intensity.

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Fini and her Men

Leonor Fini’s art is a mirror of her life—a life defiantly lived beyond the borders of patriarchy. She explored and embodied alternative models of family, love, and sexuality, not as mere provocations but as deep personal convictions. Raised without a father and surrounded by free-thinking spirits, Fini rejected the normative ideals of motherhood and monogamy. Instead, she cultivated non-conventional, often non-monogamous and fluid relationships, including long-standing bonds with bisexual men.

These choices were never hidden; they defined both her public image and her artistic language. Among her most intimate and influential companions were André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Stanislao Lepri, and Constantin Jelenski, whose presence permeates works like Autoportrait avec Kot et Sergio—a dreamlike composition where male torsos float in an indeterminate emotional space.

In Fini’s work, the bedroom becomes a symbolic stage, a site of intimacy and ritualised performance. This is vividly expressed in pieces like Dans la tour (Self-portrait with Constantin Jelenski) and L’Alcôve (Self-portrait with Nico Papatakis), where the bed is more than a physical refuge—it becomes an emblem of ambiguity, identity, and play. She recalled that sleeping beside her mother in childhood were among her happiest memories, and this intimacy without a paternal figure haunted and nourished her imagination.

Her exploration of erotic space often extended beyond the private, reaching into semi-public realms, conjuring visions of harems and theatrical enclosures—liminal spaces that blurred the lines between desire, privacy, and performance.

Works such as Les Carcans (The Shackles) and Rasch, Rasch, Rasch, meine Puppen Warten! (Hurry, hurry, hurry, my dolls are waiting!) reflect this tension between public provocation and private liberation. In these, Fini celebrates a fluid, transgressive sexuality—one that challenges the binary gaze and anticipates the language of freedom and identity that only much later would be fully embraced.

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Queer as Folk: Androgyny and the Reimagined Narcissus

Leonor Fini had no time for convention—especially not the artistic kind that told her what was proper to paint, how to paint it, and who was allowed to desire whom. One of her most subtly radical moves was reclaiming the male body as an object of female (and queer) desire.

For centuries, art history has ogled the female nude from a male perspective. Fini flipped the canvas. Her gaze, unmistakably her own, lingers on the delicate, androgynous beauty of men, recasting them not as heroes or predators, but as enigmatic muses, often languid, sensual. Her references reached back to the elegance of Mannerism and the drama of the Renaissance, but her message was totally modern: bodies—and desire—don’t obey binaries.

In works like Femme assise sur un homme nu (Woman Sitting on a Naked Man) or Portrait de Nico Papatakis (Portrait of Nico Papatakis, Nude), we encounter something tender and bold: a queering of the male form, infused with a quiet eroticism that resists dominance and embraces ambiguity. Elsewhere, in L’Homme aux chouettes (The Man with the Owls), wisdom and desire twist around each other as a man is stalked by a sexualized sphinx—half beast, half oracle, fully symbolic.

Fini wasn’t theorising; she was living these questions. Her personal life was fluid, unconventional, and joyfully nonconforming. Her biographer Peter Webb suggests she was inspired by Freud’s idea of innate bisexuality, the belief that desire in its purest form is unbounded, organic, and indifferent to gender. This resonates not only in her canvases but also in the playful and intimate photographs taken during long summers in Tor San Lorenzo and Nonza, where her entourage of muses, friends, and lovers enacted a kind of liberated utopia.

All this culminates in the aptly titled Narcisse incomparable—not the Greek youth punished for vanity, but a kind of spiritual twin, an ideal synthesis of myth and memoir, masculine and feminine, reality and dream. It’s not about falling in love with one’s reflection, but about discovering a self that refuses to be pinned down, a body that belongs to no one and yet beckons everyone.

In Fini’s hands, Narcissus is not a warning. He’s an invitation—to look again, to desire differently, and to imagine new ways of seeing, being, and loving.

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Beyond the Sphinx: the Archetypes of Female Power

Leonor Fini’s world is a matriarchal cosmos—not a fantasy, but a radical reimagining of history, myth, and identity. Her canvases are ruled by women, not as ornaments or muses, but as sovereigns, warriors, seers, and shape-shifters. Like many women artists of her generation, Fini sought to forge her identity in a male-dominated art world by creating her own mythology—a pantheon of female strength.

As art critic Gloria Orenstein notes, these were women claiming what she calls the Female Archetype, reclaiming not the infantilised “femme-enfant” so popular among the Surrealists, but figures of mature, self-possessed authority. Drawing on Jungian archetypes, Fini painted sphinxes, chimaeras, witches, and alchemists—not as fantasy creatures but as symbolic strategies. Through them, she encoded a femininity that defied patriarchal norms, honouring an age—half dreamed, half remembered—when women freely expressed their spiritual, psychic, and erotic power.

In L’Alcôve, Leonora Carrington appears not as a friend but as a kindred warrior—a modern-day Joan of Arc, timeless and fearless. Fini’s warrior women, such as in Femme en armure II (Woman in Armor II), wore corsets merged with masculine armor—at once protection and provocation. These hybrids suggested not submission but androgynous strength, agency, and defiance. Her universe was filled with sorceresses, goddesses, faeries, and destroyers, archetypes of transformation, often bathed in shadow yet glowing from within.

Nowhere is this duality clearer than in her second take on Le Bout du monde (The Edge of the World), a haunting apocalyptic vision in which the last figure standing is not a broken remnant of civilisation, but a luminous, almost blindingly white woman. Perhaps, Fini suggests, in the rubble of the postwar world, it would be women—resolute, mythical, reborn—who would shape the future.

 

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Theatre and Cinema: Between Public Spectacle and Private Ritual

To speak of Leonor Fini is to speak of the theatre—not just as a venue, but as a worldview. Her art is steeped in the theatrical, blurring the boundaries between high culture and popular fantasy, grandeur and intimacy. Each painting feels like a private stage, a scene set not in a grand hall but in a velvet-draped room, where the performance is for one pair of eyes alone.

Her lifelong passion for costume and scenography became not just a motif, but a career within a career. Fini designed for opera, ballet, cinema, and stage, collaborating with some of the most prestigious houses in Europe. Whether dressing Maria Callas at La Scala in Il ritorno del serraglio or designing for Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Palais Garnier in Paris, she brought her vision to life in silk, bone, and velvet.

Fini obviously wasn’t just sketching dresses. Her work shows an architect’s grasp of space, a sculptor’s feel for texture, and a symbolist’s love of meaning. She envisioned costumes for Roland Petit’s Les Demoiselles de la nuit and (even if unofficially) contributed to Fellini’s 8½, And she understood how to build a world—not just for the audience, but for the body within it.

This section of the exhibition collects her sketches and designs, but also her obsession with materials: furniture, fabrics, jewelry, even corsets-as-thrones. She brought the Renaissance into dialogue with the Surreal, envisioning chairs shaped like armored torsos, cabinets that looked like sacred relics, and corsets made from ebony and mother-of-pearl. Among her most iconic design works is the bottle for Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume—a curvaceous torso of pink glass that could have walked straight out of one of Fini’s paintings. Elsewhere, she curated groundbreaking shows, like Leo Castelli’s first exhibition in Paris, blurring the lines between curation and creation.

And through it all, Leonor Fini was never merely behind the scenes. She dressed like her paintings—corseted, crowned, and radiant, slipping between persona and person like quicksilver. In her world, life itself was a performance, staged in satins and shadows, embroidered in mystery, and always in motion.

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Persona: the Ultimate Mask

The last section of the exhibition is left for the most intimate territory of all: the construction of the self—not just the artist, but the persona, the myth, the mask she chose to wear. This final section reveals how Fini consciously crafted her public image through photography and self-fashioning, walking the razor’s edge between self-representation and self-invention. More than narcissism, the endless variations of her image show a lucid awareness of the power of appearance, and of how identity, especially for a woman in the 20th century, could be reclaimed not through confession but through performance.

In a 1950 letter, writer Jean Genet urged Fini to shed her theatricality, to “stop disappearing” and simply “appear.” But Genet missed the point. For Fini, constructing a mask wasn’t to hide—it was to reveal something more profound, poetic and chosen. Her myth was her truth.

Fini’s commitment to the art of persona extended to her elaborate costumes and masks, both in life and on stage. She was a fixture in the night world of postwar Paris, not because she partied, but because she transformed every entrance into a scene, a spell, a declaration.

“I have always loved dressing up,” she confessed. “Not for the ball, not to dance, but just to arrive. To intoxicate myself with myself for a moment.” Her costumes—lavish, theatrical, impossible to ignore—were made to make you pause, to draw breath, to witness. “If they made people step back just to see me pass,” she said, “then yes, that fulfilled me completely.”

And the show leaves us not with a fixed image, but with a thousand reflections—Leonor Fini as sphinx, as sorceress, as lover, as myth. Not a single truth, but a shimmering constellation of selves. Because for Fini, identity was never something to be defined. It was always something to be performed—deliberately, defiantly, and magnificently.