A major Leonor Fini retrospective opens at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in October, giving the self-taught painter — who refused the Surrealist label, lived in a ménage à trois with two men and at least 23 cats, and dressed as a cardinal to scandalize Paris — her most sustained institutional attention in years.

Fini said she loved the "sensation of changing dimension, species, space." Metamorphic energy infused both her life and her work. The pull toward liminality, ambiguity and flux fueled her creative fire: the tension between eternity and mortality that animates everyone was, for her, right at the surface.

Often associated with the Surrealists, Fini made art that grappled with the group's questions about dreams, the unconscious and the erotic — but she firmly rejected the label. She wanted no association with André Breton's misogyny, and she remained fiercely independent. She also hated being called a "woman artist"; she preferred to just be an artist.

"In my paintings I never say 'I'," Fini once wrote. She insisted her work not be read, as art by women often is, as pure autobiography. Yet her life and art were fundamentally intertwined. Dressing up was a huge part of her practice. "To dress up, to disguise oneself," she said, "is an act of creativity."

That affinity for disguise started early. Fini was born in 1907 in Argentina to an Argentine father and Italian mother. Her father was abusive; her mother fled back to Italy with Fini when she was still a baby. For the rest of her childhood, Fini lived under the threat of her father's hired kidnappers, who searched for her in Trieste. Her mother often dressed her as a boy to confuse them. Her childhood was a paradox — clouded by trauma and disguise, yet safely ensconced in the matriarchal space of her mother's family home.

Fini taught herself to paint, practicing by imitating works in the museums of northern Italy. Her Italian family, though cultured, did not wholeheartedly support her artistic ambitions, so she persevered alone. The Italian Mannerists especially influenced her, with their overly idealized forms and shiny, perfect finishes. Under Fini's brush, figures became otherworldly in their glossy intentionality.

In 1932 she moved to Paris and met the Surrealist artists and writers orbiting Breton. Her work had a natural kinship with theirs, and she became an instant star. She appeared at one of their haunts dressed in the torn robes of a Catholic cardinal, saying she wanted to inhabit the clothes of a man who would never know a woman's body. The house came down. She was instantly iconic.

Fini was romantically involved with members of the group, including Max Ernst. But she also found crucial friendships, above all with Ernst's great love, Leonora Carrington. Fini was a decade older than Carrington, though she flagrantly lied about her age to seem younger. When Ernst was taken prisoner in France at the start of the Second World War, Carrington wrote Fini a series of increasingly desperate letters describing her despair and descent into madness — a messy, heartrending testament to the solidarity between the two women.

Fini's painting of Carrington, The Alcove: An Interior with Three Women (1939), is a ferocious assertion of feminine strength. Carrington stands before two seated women wearing an armored breastplate over a purple top, a chartreuse skirt and bright red stockings. The drapery, the imperturbable expression, the outfit signaling both readiness for battle and suave elegance — all of it gestures toward traditional Western portraiture of monarchs and generals. This cocktail of historicism, dreamy strangeness and fierce womanly energy defines Fini's oeuvre.

Her male figures are striking in a different way: exceptionally beautiful and exceptionally submissive. In In the Tower (Self-Portrait with Constantin Jelenski), 1952, Fini wears a dramatic Renaissance-esque black dress while her lover stands nude beneath a red cardinal's cape. She leads; he follows. In L'Alcove (1941), a female figure — possibly Fini — lurks behind a nude man asleep in bed, styled like a Renaissance-era Venus, coyly holding the bedclothes to just barely cover himself. The contrast between unconscious, regarded man and alert, watching woman turns the tradition of voyeurism on its head.

In 1944, Fini was commissioned to illustrate a new edition of the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, a sadomasochistic origin text central to several key Surrealist men, including Breton and Hans Bellmer. Her 22 drawings did not illustrate specific moments from the text; instead she entered into its sadistic ethos to create her own interpretations. Critics and scholars have repeatedly claimed that Fini was the only artist associated with Surrealism who truly created a new erotic visual language centered on feminine desire — an ethos that perhaps peaked in this project, which claims agency over source material that subjugates women.

Her works had appeared in MoMA's landmark "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" exhibition in New York in 1936, among other shows with "Surreal" in the title, but no labels ever really suited her. She never labeled her sexuality, though we might now call her queer or polyamorous. From 1952 she lived in a more or less stable ménage à trois with Jelenski and Stanislao Lepri — and their numerous cats. "I've always preferred to live in a sort of community," she said. "A big house with my atelier and cats and friends, one with a man who was rather a lover and another who was rather a friend."

The sphinx became her leitmotif, first appearing in the early 1940s. In drawings, her sphinxes are highly legible in an Egyptian style, with strong cat bodies and luscious womanly heads; in paintings they are harder to read. In Little Hermit Sphinx (1948), the figure reads as a glowing, floating female bust — until one notices a paw emerging from beneath a breast. Sphinxes encapsulate metamorphosis, their strange alchemy of woman and cat evoking monstrosity and eroticism in equal measure. Breton saw the hybrid potential of women as a terrifying threat; to him, mermaids, sirens and sphinxes indicated the horrific power of women's changeability.

There is indeed something frightening in Fini's paintings: the women look ready to devour the viewer, and perhaps each other. In The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes (1941), a giant woman with a yonic armor plate looms over a barren landscape filled with bones and eight sphinxes — a profoundly dark painting in palette and feeling, with the relationship between shepherd and shepherded equally legible as protective or coercive.

Whitney Chadwick, in her 1991 book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, wrote: "For Fini, woman is sorceress and priestess, beautiful and sovereign; by assuming the form of the sphinx she exercises all the powers that have been lost to contemporary woman." Fini's embrace of hybridity is a direct provocation to the femme-enfant ideal of innocent, childish femininity that the Surrealists worshipped.

From 1944, Fini also designed costumes and sets for theatrical and ballet productions, and eventually films. Dressing up, she said, "enables one to feel gigantic, to plunge into vegetation, to become an animal, until you can feel invulnerable and timeless, taking part in forgotten rituals."

In the second half of the 20th century her work evolved stylistically but kept turning art-historical traditions on their heads: a reworked, spooky purple Ophelia after John Everett Millais in 1963, the Gustav Klimtian Heliodora (1964), the Egon Schiele-esque La Peine Capitale (1976). She remained in Paris all her life. When she died in 1996, her cats — at least 23 at one point — continued to roam her apartment, cared for by friends in her memory until their own natural ends.

"I am fascinated by the androgyne," she told her biographer Peter Webb, "for it seems to me to be the ideal. It unites the thinking aspect of the male with the imaginative side of the female. I would like to think of myself as androgynous."

Her continued invisibility in art history reflects an ongoing inability to write history beyond a flow chart of -isms and clearly defined movements. The Frankfurt retrospective suggests that correction is finally underway.