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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