By Emily Burkhart
June 16, 2024
Florence Henri (1893-1982), Self-Portrait, 1928. Gelatin silver print, 9 ⅞ x 7 ¼ in. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
What I want above all in photography is to compose the image as I do with paintings. It is necessary that the volumes, lines, the shadows and light obey my will and say what I want them to say. And this under the strictest control of composition, because I do not try either to tell about the world or to tell about my thoughts. All that I know and the way in which I know it is made above all of abstract elements: spheres, planes, and grids with parallel lines offer me great resources.
-Florence Henri
Introduction
The multidisciplinary artist Florence Henri (1893-1982) was a pioneering twentieth-century avant-garde painter and photographer with a background in piano composition. Best known for her experimental mirror photographs taken between 1928 and the late 1930s, Henri’s oeuvre is representative of the New Vision (Neues Sehen), a photography movement promoted by the Hungarian artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946). Moholy-Nagly was an influential instructor at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, where Henri studied painting for a time. He advocated bringing science and technology into the arts, emphasizing form and function over aesthetics. Through photography, Henri became one of the few women artists involved in this male-dominated movement. The outbreak of World War II forced Henri to return her focus to painting as photographic supplies dwindled and also for fear of the Nazi’s labeling both her and her photographic work degenerate. She would not be recognized again for her pioneering photography until the 1970s, when she was in her eighties.
Early Life
Florence Montagne Henri was born in New York City on June 28, 1893, to a French father and German mother. Following the death of her mother in 1895, Henri and her father left the United States. She accompanied him as he traveled for work as the director of a petroleum company. Henri spent her childhood between maternal relatives in Silesia (now southwestern Poland), Munich, Vienna, a convent school in Paris, and family homes in London and on the Isle of Wight in the UK, where she and her father settled in 1906. Just two years later her father died and the now teenaged Henri went to live in Rome with her Aunt Annie and her husband, the Italian Futurist poet Gino Gori, who introduced Henri to the avant-garde. While in Italy, Henri continued the piano studies she had begun at the age of nine with the Italian pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) and became an excellent pianist by eighteen. She moved to Berlin around 1912 to further her musical education. Two years later, when the First World War broke out, she found herself trapped in Germany. To make ends meet, she composed music for silent films to earn a living.
Art Education
At about this time, Henri visited the Academy of Art in Berlin and decided to pursue painting instead of music, enrolling in 1914. Soon after, she met the German Jewish art critic and historian Carl Einstein (1885-1940), who became a close friend and mentor. Through Einstein, she became acquainted with Herwarth Walden (1878-1941) and other avant-garde artists. Beginning in 1922, Henri trained in the studio of the Latvian painter Johann Walter-Kurau (1869-1932). When she decided to move to Paris in 1924, she was denied entry into France and declared “stateless.” Through a marriage of convenience to Karl Anton Koster (they divorced in 1954), Henri attained Swiss citizenship. She was then permitted to reside in Paris. She took classes at the Académie Moderne and Académie Montparnasse in 1925, studying under the Cubist and Purist painters Fernand Léger (1881-1955), André Lhote (1885-1962), and Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966).
Florence Henri in her studio with some of her paintings, Saint-Tropez, France, summer 1926. Photographer unknown. Galleria Martini & Ronchetti, Florence Henri Archives, Genoa, Italy. Image courtesy of Hundred Heroines.
In 1927, at the age of thirty-four, Henri returned to Germany to enroll at the Bauhaus school as a non-matriculating student. There she studied painting with Josef Albers (1888-1976), Paul Klee (1879-1940), and Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944). While photography was not officially included in the curriculum until 1929, it had already been used for documentary, experimental, and publicity purposes. At the Bauhaus, she was introduced to the subject by her teacher and mentor, László Moholy-Nagy. Henri also developed a close friendship with Moholy-Nagy’s first wife, the British photographer Lucia Moholy (1894-1989), who encouraged Henri’s experimentation with the camera and took photographs of her, including the 1927 portrait below. Within a year, Henri pivoted again, this time abandoning painting for photography.
Lucia Moholy (b. Austria-Hungary, 1894-1989), Florence Henri, 1927. Gelatin silver print, 14 ⅝ x 10 15/16 in. The Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Henri returned to Paris in 1929 and opened a photographic studio out of which she taught photography and worked as a freelance commercial photographer in the fashion and advertising fields to support herself and her art. She completed commissions for portraits, advertising, and fashion for Vogue magazine, The New York Herald, and other publications. Among her students were the photographers Ilse Bing (1899-1998), Giséle Freund (1908-2000), and Lisette Model (1901-1983), each of whom became well-known in her own right.
The New Vision (Neues Sehen)
New Vision (Neues Sehen or Neue Optik in German) was an artistic movement that evolved in the 1920s out of the principles of the Bauhaus. The term was coined by Moholy-Nagy to describe the technological nature of the twentieth-century following World War I. Avant-garde artists, commercial illustrators, and journalists turned to photography as if seeking to discover through its mechanisms and materials something of the soul of contemporary industrial society. The 1920s and 1930s were an innovative time as unconventional techniques such as abstract photograms or photomontages consisting of fragmented images, and combinations of photography and graphic design flourished. The New Vision aimed to look at the world through the camera lens, using it as a mirror to the reality of the everyday, and also a framing device for the documentary and experimental. Henri’s work in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s reflected this new approach to photography and some of these images are included here.
Selected Works
Self-Portrait, 1928
Florence Henri (1893-1982), Self-Portrait, 1928. Gelatin silver print, 9 ⅞ x 7 ¼ in. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Henri took many self-portraits throughout her career, the earliest being 1928’s carefully composed Self-Portrait, one of her best-known. We see the upper half of Henri’s likeness reflected in a mirror against a wall. Except for a light-colored button on her right sleeve, she appears to be wearing a solid black shirt. She leans on her folded arms propped on a slatted wood table with her hands resting on her crossed forearms. Since only Henri’s reflection appears in the photograph, it is a picture of a picture, a study in light and dark. Lower down in front of the mirror, are two shiny spheres. Their reflection makes it appear as though there are four. Self-Portrait along with one of Henri’s still lifes that also featured mirrors were both published in the Dutch avant-garde journal i10 Internationale Revue on December 20, 1928. The photos were accompanied by a commentary from Moholy-Nagy. In what was the first critical assessment of Henri’s work, he asserted that:
With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today….Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective and viewpoint.
Mirrors were a recurring “prop” in Henri’s early photographs, used not only in self-portraits and portraits of others, but also in still lifes and often in her commercial work as well. As Priscilla Frank observed, she used them “as a surrealist tool to disrupt perception, disorient the viewer and multiply her subject matter into infinity ambiguity.”
Fruit, 1929
Florence Henri (1893-1982), Fruit, 1929. Gelatin silver print, 6 ⅝ x 9 ½ in. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
In the still life Fruit (1929), Henri placed a pear in a dish on a tabletop as well as a lime and an apple directly on the table. Several small mirrors also arrayed on the table’s surface create different planes, jagged images, and reflections. The lime and the pear are in the viewer's field of vision, while the apple appears only as a reflection in a mirror. The fragmentation created is like that of a cubist painting. Henri’s photos were included in several prominent German photography exhibitions of the time, including Fotografie der Gegenwart (Contemporary Photography, 1929) in Berlin, Film und Foto (Film and Photo, 1929) in Stuttgart, and Das Lichtbild (The Photograph, 1930) in Munich, along with others across Europe and in New York throughout the 1930s.
Portrait Composition (Woman with Cards), 1930
Florence Henri (1893-1982), Portrait Composition (Woman with Cards), 1930. Gelatin silver print, 11 in. x 8 13/16 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Another of Henri’s well-known photographs, Portrait Composition (Woman with Cards) from 1930 depicts a woman in full makeup, closed eyes with shadowed lids, mascaraed lashes, and penciled arched eyebrows. Her painted lips are parted slightly exposing a hint of teeth. She reclines, her bare right arm over her head, an eight of diamonds in her hand. Scattered on the bed above her are other playing cards, mostly indistinguishable. Arrayed as they are, the cards look like the woman may have simply fallen asleep during a game or that these are the cards she has drawn in the game of life. Or, the eight in her hand may symbolize the woman’s “sun card”–a person who is powerful and may be dominating. It may represent her changeable, independent nature, an intense desire for knowledge and a belief that knowledge is power. Whichever or whatever, the woman seems untroubled.
The close cropping may have been inspired by the photos of Henri’s friend Lucia Moholy, who often employed this cropping technique as she did in her 1927 portrait of Henri. Moholy thought it better focused the eye thus revealing the essence and character of the subject. Both Henri and Moholy were inspired by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s influential 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin in which such close framing was used to emphasize the emotions and reactions of the actors.
Nu, ca. 1930
Florence Henri (1893-1982), Nu, ca. 1930. Gelatin silver print, dimensions unavailable. Galleria Martini & Ronchetti, Florence Henri Archives, Genoa, Italy. Image courtesy of AnOther Magazine.
In addition to portraiture, Henri shot a series of female nudes. Nu (1930) is an example. In an unadorned room on a disheveled bed, a woman in three-quarter view sits with knees tucked beneath her. She leans on one arm, the other hand caresses her neck. Her chin tilts upward, her eyes gaze downward. She exudes an ease with her nudity. Henri has employed her characteristic contrast of light and dark to highlight her sitter’s physicality without oversexualizing her. The light on her back throws the front of her torso chastely into shadow except in the triangular area made by her arm, thigh, and torso. There her backlit breast with a hint of nipple is sharply outlined. In 1935, Henri published this and other nude studies as a collection in the book, Femmes Nues (Female Nudes).
Nature Morte (Roses), 1931
Florence Henri (1893-1982), Nature Morte (Roses), 1931. Silver gelatin print, 13.25 x 18.75 in. Edition 6/9. Holden Luntz Gallery, Palm Beach, FL. Image courtesy of Holden Luntz Gallery.
In the 1931 photo entitled Nature Morte (Roses), a single rose lies on an unfolded sheet of paper while a stem with four leaves rests on an open envelope at the upper right. A mirror may reflect the rose and stem or it may be an actual second rose and stem–it is not clear what is or may not be a reflection. Nonetheless, it is an unconventional floral arrangement or “still life.” The close-up emphasizes the texture of the rose petals, their slight wilt, and the veining of the leaves. As the title implies, the rose and leaves are dying; but, of course, since they are cut, they are already dead. Their life has been stilled; it has unfolded.
ROME (The Glory that Was Greece), 1934
Florence Henri (1893-1982), ROME (The Glory that Was Greece), 1934. Vintage gelatin silver photomontage, 9 x 11 5/16 in. Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Image courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery.
Henri also experimented with photomontage, a technique adopted by Surrealist and Pop artists as well. Photomontage, the combination of two or more photographs (or pieces of them) to form a single image, came to prominence as a Dadaist form of political protest during the First World War in Germany. Henri was aware of the Dada Group from her time at the Bauhaus. Though not protest art, her Surrealist-inspired photomontage ROME (The Glory that Was Greece) evokes nostalgia for a bygone era. Henri was familiar with Greco-Roman ruins from her time in Italy. The sculptural head in the foreground has been toppled from its body, which is not shown, and rests on a blanket by the sea.
The message seems bleak, a head without a body juxtaposed against the shore. On the horizon a distant mountain range nearly blends into a silvery-gray sky as the waves break.
The ironic title of this photomontage comes from the middle stanza of the Edgar Allen Poe poem, “To Helen” (1831, revised by Poe in 1845):
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece.
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Whether Henri was familiar with the poem or the mythology of Helen is unknown but probable. The image is certainly suggestive. ROME (The Glory that Was Greece) was featured in the exhibitions, The Source (February-March 2008) and Fabricated Realities (July-August 2011), at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.
Portrait Composition, 1937
Florence Henri (1893-1982), Portrait Composition, 1937. Gelatin silver print,11 7/10 x 8 7/10 in. Edition 2/9. Atlas Gallery, London. Image courtesy of Atlas Gallery.
Portrait Composition from 1937 was one of Henri’s last photographs before the outbreak of the Second World War. One of her few works to feature a smiling subject, a woman in profile casually sits with her legs crossed in a chair on a balcony. She wears a floral patterned dress with mandarin collar. Her chin is tilted, her hair slightly tousled. She is framed by an awning or umbrella. Henri has positioned a mirror to reflect the opposite wall of the balcony, and the shadow of an armrest and the back of another chair can be seen. A column with a plant in a basket is partially visible. One can see the rooftops of buildings in the background. Henri has created a split-screen image with her placement of the mirror. Sunlight casts hard shadows caught in both the mirror and on the balcony where the woman sits, especially through the gridwork of the railing. It seems a meditation on reality.
Soon, Henri’s output would decline significantly as photographic materials became difficult to obtain and her compositions would be considered degenerate by the Nazis occupying France.
Late Career and Rediscovery
With but a few notable exceptions, one being a series of photos of the American ballet dancer and member of the Choctaw Nation Rosella Hightower (1920-2008) in the 1950s, Henri returned almost exclusively to painting. After leaving Paris for Belleville-sur-Vie, a former commune in Western France in 1963, she gave up photography for painting full-time. In the 1970s, she moved to the village of Compiégne, where she lived and painted until the end of her life.
If not for the efforts of an Italian gallerist named Giovanni Battista Martini, Henri would likely have fallen into obscurity. In the early 1970s, Martini came across a portfolio of Henri’s work in an old art magazine Stile Futurista and spent two years searching for the artist. After finding her in Compiégne, Martini and Henri worked together to catalog her archive before her death. In 1974, she had her first solo exhibition in four decades at the Galerie Wilde in Cologne, Germany, at which time a small portfolio of her photographs was also published.
Henri died on July 24, 1982, at the age of 89. Posthumously, she has been included in a number of solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the exhibition, “Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum” that ran from April 16-October 10, 2022. Her work was also featured at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Despite her rediscovery in the 1970s, Florence Henri still remains little known outside of art circles today.
Florence Henri in 1975. Photographer unknown. Galerie m, Bochum, Germany. Image courtesy of Galerie m.