Leonor Fini was born in Argentina. Spirited away to Trieste by her Italian mother before she was a year old; for the first six or seven years of her life, she was disguised as a boy whenever she left her home to avoid kidnap attempts by her father. Raised in the "Bohemian" salons of a radically changing Europe between the two World Wars, her precociousness manifested in the creation of a persona of incredibly strong will and intense sensitivity. Leonor left her family first in 1927 to spend a year in Milan and then in 1931 to establish her career as a painter in Paris. Never having affiliations with the Surrealist group, she nevertheless became friends with Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Salvador Dali. Her artistic formation was largely autodidactic and her nature uncompromisingly independent, which may account in part for the difficulty in placing her work in a school or movement. " I paint pictures which do not exist and which I would like to see." This declaration from Le Livre de Leonor Fini demonstrates her desire to seek inspiration above all from the deeply personal affinities of her inner "musée imaginaire". With a decided inclination for the theatrical she was often photographed at costume balls and she complemented her art with many designs of sets and costumes for opera, ballet, theater and films. Fini always refused to accept being categorized. This is evident in her wide variations of media, style and purpose. The questions as to what "school" of art she belongs to; to whom can she be compared, is she a painter, an illustrator, a designer, a feminist, a mystic, a voluptuary are superfluous. Her answer would have been that she is Leonor Fini!