Argentinian artist and designer Léonor Fini was BOTD in 1907. Born in Buenos Aires, her parents separated when she was a baby, and she was raised by her mother in Trieste, Italy. She developed an early interest in art, drawing sketches of cadavers at the local mortuary, studying art in books from her uncle’s library and visiting galleries throughout Europe. In her teens, she suffered from rheumatic conjunctivitis and was required to wear bandages on both eyes, an experience she later credited with sparking her artistic imagination. She had her first solo exhibition aged 17, relocating to Paris in 1931, where she befriended Surrealist artists Man Ray, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. She developed an eccentric, theatrical style, drawing from Classical mythology (notably the Sphinx, a recurring emblem of female erotic power), Freudian notions of the unconscious and fantastical landscapes. Her work frequently depicted lesbian erotic scenes, notably Le leçon de botanique (The Botany Lesson) in which a nude female figure tickles a giant anatomical model of a vagina. When once asked to describe her work, she replied “I paint pictures which don’t exist and which I would like to see.” In 1936, her work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was included Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 show Exhibition by 31 Women alongside Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning. She had a successful second career as a designer, collaborating with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli on a perfume bottle modelled on the figure of actress Mae West, and designing costumes for the Paris Opéra, the Comédie Française and La Scala in Milan. In the 1960s, she became better known to international audiences as costume designer for Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8 1/2 and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death. She also illustrated editions of a number of erotic texts, including the Marquis de Sade‘s Juliette, Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O (The History of O) and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and wrote three novels. Known for her beauty and eccentricity, she posed nude for portraits by society photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Platt Lynes. Openly bisexual, she left her husband Federico Veneziani in 1941 for Italian diplomat Stanislao Lepri. They lived in Paris in a menage-a-trois with her Polish lover Konstanty Jeleński and her 23 Persian cats, an arrangement later described by Fini’s assistant as “a little bit of prison and a lot of theatre”. Her other lovers included the artists Richard Overstreet and Eros Renzetti and the poet Juan-Bautista Pinero, though less is known about her lesbian relationships. She died in 1996, aged 88.