Becoming Leonor Fini – Theatrical Self-Performances between Art and Life

Using theories of performativity, this talk explores Leonor Fini’s (1907-1996) self-fashioning and dressing-up practices, highlighting how her extension of artistic creative practices, from painted artworks to her self-creation through costumes, masks and fashion, allowed her to become a living artwork. Fini’s personal theatricality, photographic self-portraits and self-transformative, genderbending, transgressive dressing-up games in relation to surrealist practices, reveal the hybrid identities that made up Fini’s character. Here, the artist’s self-fashioning must be understood as a substantial creative practice developing and confirming artistic and personal autonomy and pointing to an extended concept of art where creation and self-creation powerfully enable each other.

Andrea Kollnitz is Professor in Art History and Head of the Art History Department at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on the self-fashioning of avant-garde artists; art and nationalism; the Nordic avant-garde from transnational perspectives. Kollnitz is co-editor of the books Fashion and Modernism (Bloomsbury 2018), A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, vol 2: 1925-1950 (Brill, 2019), Fashion, Performance & Performativity (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is currently leading a research project on Surrealism in Sweden and recently published Becoming Leonor Fini: Theatrical Self-Performances between Art and Life (Bloomsbury, 2025).