Leonor Fini (30 August 1907 – 18 January 1996) was an Argentinian born Italian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful and erotic women. Early life Fini was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Malvina Braun Dubich (born in Trieste, with German, Slavic and Venetian ancestry) and Herminio Fini (with ancestry from Benevento, Italy). Herminio was a handsome and very wealthy man, but also tyrannical, with extreme religious views. He made his young wife very unhappy and, within eighteen month's of Leonor's birth, she fled back to Trieste with the child. Leonor was raised there and she would be expelled from various schools for being rebellious. As a Catholic, Herminio refused to give Malvina a divorce, which was only granted to her in 1919 through an Italian court. Custody battles often involved Fini and her mother in sudden flights and disguises. In her early teens, an eye disease forced her to wear bandages on both eyes. After recovering, she decided to become an artist. She moved to Milan at the age of 17, and then to Paris, in either 1931 or 1932. There, 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. She 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 her then partner, de Mandiargues. The photograph of Fini sold in 2007 for $305,000 - the highest price paid at auction for one of Cartier-Bresson's works to that date. Career Fini had no formal artistic training, yet she was familiar with the traditional Renaissance and Mannerist styles encountered during her upbringing in Italy. When she was 17, she had a painting exhibited in a gallery in Trieste and received a commission to paint portraits from dignitaries in 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. Fini was part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, and very important in the Surrealist movement though she is often overlooked in favour of her male contemporaries. Fini never officially joined the Surrealist movement though she did show her work alongside other Surrealist