A Leonor Fini Retrospective Provokes Surrealism’s Fascination with Youthful Femininity

Leonor Fini said she loved the “sensation of changing dimension, species, space.” Her life and work were infused with metamorphic energy. The draw of liminality, ambiguity, and flux was fuel for her creative fire: The tension between eternity and mortality that animates all of us on some level was at the surface for her. Often associated with the Surrealists, Fini made art that grappled with many of the group’s questions about dreams, the unconscious, and the erotic, but she fi