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Leonor Fini
Topics: Argentine painters Italian-Argentines
Leonor Fini was an Argentine surrealist painter.
She was born in Buenos Aires to an Italian mother and an Argentinian father. Her mother left her father before Leonor's first birthday. She took the child to her home in Trieste, Italy, where LF was disguised as a boy whenever she left her house for the next five years in order to foil kidnap attempts by her father.
After leaving Trieste at the age of 17 to paint a family's portraits in Milano (where she had her first painting exhibition) she relocated to Paris in either 1931 or 1932. There, she became acquainted with, among many others,Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso,Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, and Salvador Dali. She traveled around Europe by car with de Mandiargues and Cartier-Bresson where she was photographed nude in a swimming pool by Cartier-Bresson. His photograph of Leonor sold in 2007 for $305,000 - the highest price paid at auction for one of his works to that date.
Related websites
Biography at the Gallery Minsky (and pictures)
Another biography and pictures of paintings
Still another biography from NNDB (Notable Names Database)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Leonor Fini
