Leonor Fini “The Shepherdess of the Sphynx” at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice

Painting - Oil on Canvas (46.2 x 38.2 cm) 1941

Leonor Fini was born in Buenos Aires in 1907. Her mother was Italian and her father Argentine.

Shepherdess of the Sphynx Arriving in Italy in Trieste, she was in contact with the intellectuals who frequented the family home, including James Joyce.

Without receiving any special artistic training, she learned part of her profession by working with Achille Funi in Milan.

In 1933, she went to Paris and met several members of the surrealist movement. Among them, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard and Victor Brauner.

However, Leonor Fini never officially joined the surrealist movement. An informal membership that did not prevent her from being very close to it, especially at the symbols level.

She was significantly interested in the Sphinx, the mythological creature most admired by the majority of surrealists.

Peggy Guggenheim purchased this painting by Leonor Fini “The Shepherdess of the Sphynx” at Max Ernst's request, who had seen it in Fini's studio in Monte Carlo in 1941.

For Leonor Fini, the Egyptian Sphinx was a matriarchal and humanist figure.

Shepherdess of the Sphynx But the Sphinx has also long been associated with death and destruction before the transformation.

For Whitney Chadwick, this suggests that everyone have the power to form their own identity and reinvent themselves:

“By assuming the shape of the sphinx, Fini exercises all the lost female powers to return them to the contemporary woman.”
Whitney Chadwick

Fini's painting shows the shepherdess of the sphinxes in an apocalyptic, desert and arid landscape where the only signs of life are cut flowers scattered on the ground.

Broken bones, remnants of sphinx meals litter the ground of this dramatic landscape.

The shepherdess stands in the middle of her herd of eight half-female sphinxes, half lions. She has a lost look. She doesn't look at us or her sphinxes, she's somewhere else.