One of my favorite paintings is one by a trained elephant that I picked up on holiday in Thailand daubed by a trained elephant. It's not a very good one, but the story behind it makes it special -- highlighting one of the aspects by which art has come to be judged.
In a similar way, the story of Leonor Fini, the Surrealist painter whose works are on view at the Bunkamura, adds a certain mystique and fascination to her art, although, luckily, in her lengthy career, she learned to paint a lot better than the average tourist-friendly elephant.
Her life was marked by a series of dramatic episodes, such as the early divorce of her parents. One year after she was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1907, her Italian mother divorced her father and took her back to Italy, where Fini was routinely disguised as a boy to prevent her estranged Argentinian father kidnapping her and taking her back to Argentina.
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