In the postwar years, Fini continued to paint as well as design sets and costumes for ballet, theater, and film. She created designs for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet Palaise de Crystal (now titled Symphony in C, 1947), Roland Petit’s Les Demoiselles de la Nuit (1948), for Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, and for over seventy productions at Paris theaters between 1946 and 1969 including Jean Genet’s The Maids and The Balcony. She also designed and created costumes for films including Renato Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet (1954), Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death (1969). Fini would come to illustrate about fifty books, including the works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Gérard de Nerval, and Edgar Allan Poe.

In her lifetime, Fini was the subject of retrospective exhibitions in Belgium (1965), Italy (1983), Japan (1972-73, 1985-86), and France (1986). Additional retrospectives were staged posthumously at institutions in Italy (2005, 2009), Japan (2005), Germany (1997-98), and Sweden (2014), and the artist’s first U.S. museum survey was staged at New York’s Museum of Sex from 2018 until 2019, followed by solo exhibition at the Lilley Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Reno in 2021. In 2021 and 2022, her work was included in the expansive exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern in London. In 2022, Fini was prominently included in The Witch’s Cradle, one of five historical sections embedded within The Milk of Dreams, the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale.

Examples of Fini’s works can be found in esteemed collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Miyazaki Prefectural Art Museum, Japan; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; the Musée de Grenoble, France; Museo Revoltella, Trieste, Italy; the Museum of Modern Art, Brussels; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and Tate Modern, London, among others.

A catalogue raisonné of the artist’s oil paintings was published in 2021, authored by Fini experts Richard Overstreet and Neil Zukerman. An authoritative biography by art historian Peter Webb was published in 2007 (translated to English in 2009), and the artist’s personal papers and library, previously housed in the Leonor Fini Archives directed by Overstreet in Paris, are now held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Artwork © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris, France.