Florence Henri

Mirror of the avant-garde, 1927-1940Jeu de Paume

1 Place de la Concorde, Paris

24 February until 17 May 2015

Published at Hyperallergic here

http://hyperallergic.com/190793/a-painters-reflective-and-reflected-photographic-portraits/

Fentre (1929) gelatin silver print, 37 x 27 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek.

Florence Henri Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

In 1683, the chief architect to the King of France was Jules Hardouin Mansart, the architect who

created the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. It was in his studio that the Rococo style began to

emerge, most keenly through specific mirroring motifs of his designers Pierre Lassurance I and

Pierre Le Pautre. As such, the use of mirrors in art has been a rich one, used by Pop, Kinetic,

Minimal, and Conceptual artists. That list would include Yayoi Kusama, Donald Judd,

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Nicolas Schffer, Robert Smithson, Meret Oppenheim, Lucas Samaras,

Christian Megert, Art & Language, Getulio Alviani, Joan Jonas, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Roy

Lichtenstein, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Robert Rauschenberg, Luc Peire, Richard Hamilton, Domingo

Alvarez, Shusaku Arakawa, and more recently Jeff Koons and David Altmejd.

In this elongated tradition, the Jeu de Paume currently offers an additional point of reference, here

curated by Cristina Zelich with the collaboration of the Florence Henri Archive in Genoa. It is a

taut, careful and competent look back at the work of American avant-garde photographer (and

abstract painter) Florence Henri (18931982) with her show Mirror of the avant-garde, 1927-

1940. The exhibition is comprised of beautifully framed vintage prints, various supporting

documents and published material, all set off against white or lilac painted walls.

The dominant feeling I had was one of formalized melancholy. Florence Henris photographs

often have a spatial composition that uses mirrored reflections to set up remote feelings for things

in space in a conceptually operative manner. An operative manner that opens up realms of

ontological doubt stimulated by an ambience just outside the Euclidean arrangement. Her earliest

photo compositions introduce an ambient element that would be fundamental for her artistic

investigations, namely the mirror. Using a very limited number of elements, she created extremely

complex images in the Thirties that are characterized by the use of multiple viewpoints. Her visual

investigations are excellent expressions of post-Cubist and Constructivist ideas, as reflections and

spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are explored formally in black and white.

As with many other women photographers who were well known and successful in the Twenties

and Thirties, Henris work, even though it participated in the rapid expansion of new photographic

concepts that marked a rupture with tradition, fell into almost complete oblivion. Despite the

central position that her oeuvre occupied in avant-garde photography at the end of the 1920s, her

reputation as a portraitist in Paris, and the fact that her photos had been published in many of the

periods illustrated magazines such as Arts et Mtiers and Lilliput, Henris work has remained

largely unexamined and unfamiliar.

With Mirror of the avant-garde that has changed and so we are again reminded of arts long

reflective past while already catching a glimpse of the electronic social media selfie world,

currently ours, replete with its looping narcissistic circular causality. It appears that Henri had her

eye on forms of scopic extension typical of the expanded field through an appreciation of the work

of Lszl Moholy-Nagy and his Light Space Modulator (1930). She became as concerned as

Moholy-Nagy was with opening up the static three-dimensional form to a fourth dimension of

time and motion.

In 1928, Moholy-Nagy noted in the magazine i10 that some of Henris earliest experimental photo

images involved mirrors as a way to explore the shifting representation of objects within the array

of spatial relations. That kind of formal dynamism originally initiated with the Cubo-Futurists and

then intensified and was solidified by the Constructivists, such as Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo,

Milton Cohn and Anton Pevsner. Yet Mirror of the avant-garde surprisingly did not appear all

that dated, rather calling to mind Robert Smithsons mirror works in the landscape, Nine Mirror

Displacements, Mirror Shore (1969) that he made by placing mirrors on a beach or in the jungle

of the Yucatn. Smithson then took photographs of these ordinary mirrors set out on the ground

and what they were reflecting back.

So Henris photographs from the Twenties already hint at Smithsons expanded vision, one

suggestive of the inner dimensions of the human psyche in which we explore issues of

disembodiment or obsessive self-body-image typical of the work of some Surrealist women of the

Thirties and Fourties. Indeed Henris work reminded me of that of Claude Cahun, Leonora

Carrington, Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning and

Remedios Varos self-representations; artists that explored space and their female body as a web

of social reflections and constructions. How did we loose site of Florence Henri? Fortunately, the

conscientious scholarly endeavors of Giovanni Battista Martini and Alberto Ronchetti have

succeeded in returning the artist to the place that she merits within the history of art and

photography.

Florence Henri was born in New York of a French father and German mother. Following her

mothers death in 1895, she lived in Paris, Munich and Vienna and finally moved to the Isle of

Wight in England in 1906. After her fathers death in 1907, Henri lived in Rome with her aunt and

her uncle, the Italian poet Gino Gori, a man close to the Italian Futurists. During a visit to Berlin,

Henri started to focus on painting after meeting the art critic Carl Einstein, Herwarth Walden,

Hans Arp, Adrian Ludwig Richter, and the magnificent John Heartfield. She took painting classes

with Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In 1914, she enrolled at the

Academy of Art in Berlin, and starting in 1922, trained in the studio of the painter Johannes

Walter-Kurau.

The summer of 1927 she enrolled at the Bauhaus and studied with Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers

in Dessau. Before moving to Dessau, she had studied painting with the Purists Fernand Lger and

Amde Ozenfant at the Acadmie Moderne in Paris. Although photography was not yet included

in the official Bauhaus curriculum, it was practiced by teacher and student alike. Returning to

Paris, she abandoned painting in favor of photography: work that would come to be recognized as

integral to the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement of which Lszl Moholy-Nagy was an

exponent - the triumph of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) whose leading representative was

Albert Renger-Patzsch. In Paris, Henri devoted herself to making photos, including one of her

best-known works, her self-portrait looking in the mirror with two shinny metal balls called

Autoportrait (1928). The new medium of photography enabled her to experiment with space by

the use of mirrors in many of her striking compositions, such as in Double portrait (1928) an

image where relational subjects are constituted in and by multiplicity.

Autoportrait (1928) gelatin silver print, 39 x 25 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,

Kunstbibliothek. Florence Henri Galleria Martini & Ronchett

Double portrait (1928) gelatin silver print, 24 x 18 cm. Private collection, courtesy Archives

Florence Henri, Gnes. Florence Henri Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

Indeed mirrors and their provocation of ontological relationality became the most important

feature in Henris early photographs. She used them for most of her self-portraits, for portraits of

friends and for her still lives composed with diverse industrial objects. Henri gave the crisp name

Composition to images of this type, work typical of the cutting edge trends in avant-garde

photography of the time, New Vision and New Objectivity.

Composition (1928) gelatin silver print, 27 x 37 cm. Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin. Florence Henri

Galleria Martini & Ronchetti. Photo Bauhaus Archiv

Composition (1928) gelatin silver print, 27 x 37,1 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen. Florence

Henri Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

Composition Nature morte (1929) Collage of gelatin silver prints dcoupe and pasted on paper,

12 x 14 cm. Private collection, courtesy Archives Florence Henri, Gnes. Florence Henri

Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

Later, between 1937 and 1940, Henri made regular trips to Brittany with the writer Pierre Minet.

Although documentary in nature, the photographs she took there still involve a reflection on

construction and a meticulous choice of viewpoint. In 1929 she opened a commercial portrait

studio that rivaled that of Man Ray. She also opened a school of photography where Lisette Model

and Gisle Freund studied, amongst others. Then during World War II, photographic materials

became sparse and Henri largely returned to painting.

Henris photographs radically charm the eye in their disorienting spatial compositions. In her

elegant work from the late 20s through the mid 30s, forms transfigure through a slight visual

dissonance. Yet there is also something playful and sensual about her work, even as her

compositions seem to exist on their own grounds, uncommon and unfamiliar to our own. The

reflections that cut into these images make us question whether or not anything actually exits as

we thought it did (including ourselves). Yet I think that there is something also grounding in the

general artistically composed nature of her work, something solidly balanced that makes pictorial

pleasure possible, something she pulled out from the inherent excess in reproductive capture

media: carefully constructed composition. Given the narcissistic, careless, and ubiquitous selfie

snapping mania, that is something worth reflecting upon during our current mirror phase.

Pont (1935) gelatin silver print, 23 x 24 cm. Private collection, courtesy Archives Florence

Henri, Gnes. Florence Henri Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

Autoportrait (1938) gelatin silver print, 25 x 23 cm. Private collection courtesy Archives

Florence Henri, Gnes. Florence Henri Galleria Martini & Ronchett

Bretagne (1940) gelatin silver print, 28 x 24 cm. Private collection, courtesy Archives Florence

Henri, Gnes. Florence Henri Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

Joseph Nechvatal