The idea of the mask and masquerade permitted Fini to bring her own voice to her European avant-garde circle as she drew on matriarchal mythology, witchcraft and fashion to challenge bourgeois morality and patriarchal norms. A well-read and highly intelligent woman versed in the German Romantics, including authors Achim von Arnim and Novalis, the philosophical writings of the Marquis de Sade and Friederich Nietzsche, as well as treatises on witchcraft, magic and psychoanalysis, she remained highly individualistic always, if Surrealist in her world view. As she explained, “In the widest sense, I believe that I was born a surrealist in the same way that certain painters of the past have created surreal works before the term was invented”. Masquerade offered the perfect vehicle to time and shape shift in her artistic subject-matter and style, and to emphasise that Surrealism itself could not be ‘fixed’ as one thing alone. Joan Rivière, the English psychoanalyst and well-known translator and interlocutor of the writings of Sigmund Freud, argued in Womanliness as a Masquerade (1929) a seminal essay for inter-war intellectuals,  that notions of the feminine and womanliness “could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if [a female] was found to possess it - much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods.” Rivière explains such masking as involving excessive feminine clothing, hair styles and makeup all to assuage the male fear of the new breed of independent, working, creative women. Fini’s representations of women share such masqueraderie: they are leonine haired, red lipped, buxom beauties, often with tiny pointed shoes and elongated gloved hands. L’Arme Blanche (1936) portrays a pair of nubile women in torn clothing that emphasises their unbridled sexuality, as emphasised by the love potion that literally pours into the composition, while L’Alcove/ Autoportrait avec Nico Papatakis (1941), displays the male masquerading not as a virle master but as a passive Venus. Femininity flows across the sexes as Fini suggests that it is in us all, while her choice of Renaissance-like, theatrical, settings defy a clear narrative bar that of “a world of non-differentiated, or little-differentiated sexes”.