Florence Henri

Music and Painting

Henri was born in New York and lived in several European cities from childhood. According to LACMA, she began studying piano around the age of nine in Paris, Rome, and Berlin, accompanied silent films during World War I, and turned toward painting around 1914.^*4 AWARE traces her study of abstract painting in Berlin and her movement in 1920s Paris toward the geometric constructions associated with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.^*12 The Met’s discussion of Abstract Composition likewise identifies Léger’s academy, Purism, and contact with the Bauhaus as immediate backgrounds to Henri’s entry into photography.^*3 The straight lines, circles, and planes that appear in the photographs were therefore not a style that suddenly emerged when she picked up a camera. Experience in structuring time through music and the picture plane through painting carried into the deliberate placement of objects before exposure.

Bauhaus

In 1927 Henri spent time at the Bauhaus in Dessau, encountering the teaching environment around Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy. MoMA’s account of Composition No. 19 records that after this stay she returned to Paris with a 4×5-inch camera and began photographic work in earnest.^*2 LACMA identifies the photographic practices of Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy as important to this turn.^*4 At this moment, however, the Bauhaus did not yet have an independent photography department, so it would be inaccurate to describe Henri as having completed a formal specialist course in photography. The National Gallery of Australia’s New Vision exhibition presents experimental photography of the 1920s as a set of approaches—including high and low viewpoints, reflections, and photograms—shared within and beyond the school.^*15 For Henri, the Bauhaus was less a place to learn photographic technique from the beginning than a catalyst for treating photography as an experimental medium on the same level as painting.

LACMA’s 2024 research on Henri describes her use of mirrors, prisms, and hard reflective materials to extend space and notes that formal problems often took priority over the subject itself.^*23 The mirror functioned as a device that introduced views from other directions into a camera that would ordinarily record only from one. The objects in the photographs remain real, while the spatial order represented by the image can no longer be resolved into a single viewpoint. Pictorial composition learned through painting and photography’s indexical relation to objects meet here as one technique.

Mirrors and Multiple Viewpoints

In key works from around 1928, Henri placed mirrors, metal spheres, fruit, rods, and wooden frames on a tabletop, combining real objects and their reflections within the same frame. LACMA cites Henri’s own explanation that mirrors allowed the same subject to appear from different angles in one photograph so that multiple viewpoints could interact.^*4 In MoMA’s Composition No. 19, spheres, mirrored surfaces, and lines make the boundary between object and reflection uncertain, dividing photographic depth into several planes.^*2 The Met’s Still-life with Lemon and Pear similarly turns ordinary fruit into a spatial puzzle through mirrors and geometric placement, forcing the viewer to reconsider where the objects actually are.^*16 The mirror was a device for breaking, within a single exposure, the camera’s ordinary limitation to one direction of view.

The Met’s exhibition on Bauhaus photography treats high-angle views, night scenes, photograms, architecture, and portraiture as experiments in seeing through the camera beyond normal human vision and includes Henri in this environment.^*22 Henri did more than tilt the camera: she placed a mirror in front of the subject, introducing images from several directions into a single lens. The objects undeniably existed before the camera, but depth and direction no longer settle into one coherent space in the photograph. New Vision’s “new seeing” therefore extended from unusual camera positions to the deliberate design of real space before the shutter was released.

Geometry

Abstract Composition looks like an abstract painting in its triangles, circles, and lines, while retaining the gloss, shadows, and surface textures specific to photography. The Met situates the work as an integration of Purist geometry and Bauhaus experimentation through photography.^*3 ICP’s artist record likewise places Henri within central New Vision experiments through mirrors, reflections, photomontage, and multiple exposure.^*7 Still lifes and portraits in SFMOMA’s collection retain the weight and surface of their subjects even when the image is organized as an abstract construction.^*9 Painting could draw lines and circles freely, but Henri assembled actual spheres, mirrors, bodies, and light and asked the camera to record their presence. The abstraction derives from photography’s claim that real things were in front of the lens; this is what distinguishes her method after the transition from painting to photography.

Self-Portraiture

In the 1928 Self-Portrait, Henri’s body enters the same construction as a mirror reflection, table, wooden sphere, and linear furniture. LACMA holds the work as a New Vision self-portrait that makes the mirror’s ability to combine several angles within one image particularly clear.^*4 In Centre Pompidou’s 1928 Autoportrait, the face is not the sole purpose of the image; posture, furniture, gaze, and surrounding space are all carefully arranged.^*6 In the 1938 Autoportrait (au miroir), vase, mirror, black wall, and facial reflection overlap, showing that she continued to use mirrors in images of herself a decade later.^*5 The self-portrait was less a confession designed to reveal a “true self” than a site where Henri could use her own body as the model most available for arrangement and test the rules of photographic space.

Diana C. du Pont reads Henri’s mirror as both a device for manipulating space and form and a tool for examining the self-image, identifying in the self-portraits around 1928 the problem of constructing oneself as a professional artist.^*27 Contemporary critics such as Michel Seuphor and Moholy-Nagy praised the compositions and perceptual experiments created by mirrors but paid little attention to the fact that the person in the image was Henri herself. The same photograph celebrated as a formal experiment also showed a woman using her own body as a model while controlling camera, furniture, and mirror—a professional image of authorship. This divergence in reading becomes a question in the critical history of New Vision: what aspects of the work were treated as central, and what aspects were overlooked?

The Paris Studio

Henri opened a studio in Paris in 1928 and worked professionally in portraits of artists, fashion, advertising, architecture, and still life. AWARE describes the studio as a center of both production and teaching and notes that later photographers including Gisèle Freund and Lisette Model studied with her.^*12 Centre Pompidou’s Petra van Doesburg is one example of how portrait photography recorded the personal networks of the avant-garde.^*18 In The Met’s Portrait Composition, the arrangement of a woman, playing cards, and reflective surfaces blurs the boundary between portraiture and constructed photography.^*17 AWARE’s research on women photographers in interwar Paris shows that new markets in advertising and magazines provided important spaces in which women could establish photography as a profession.^*13 Experimental and commercial photography could draw on the same skills: arranging objects and people and building an image that would read strongly on the printed page.

The New Woman Behind the Camera places the expansion of photography and print media from the 1920s through the 1950s within an international history in which advertising, fashion, and studio work provided women with opportunities to participate in public life and, in some cases, achieve economic independence.^*14 In Henri’s studio, the technique used to repeat bottles or products in mirrors for advertising emerged from the same working space as mirrored avant-garde still lifes. The 1929 Lanvin advertisement noted by AWARE and product photographs discussed by Zentrum Paul Klee show geometry and reflection functioning within commercial print as well.^*25 Her move from painting to photography therefore concerned two linked possibilities: formal experiment and the ability to sustain portraiture, advertising, magazines, and teaching as professional work with the same skills. An urban economy that needed printed images allowed mirror and geometric construction to recur across both avant-garde art and commercial photography.

《Film und Foto》

Henri participated in the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, entering an international field of new photography alongside Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Umbo, and others. MoMA’s artist record shows that she took part in major avant-garde exhibitions soon after beginning serious work with the camera.^*1 The Venice Biennale’s 2022 material reassesses mirrors, photomontage, and geometric construction as work at the intersection of interwar machine vision and women’s self-representation.^*19 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s New Woman, New Vision likewise reexamined women photographers active at and around the Bauhaus within a history of New Vision long narrated largely through male figures.^*20 These later curatorial approaches do not mean that Henri herself declared a unified movement of “women photographers.” They do provide evidence for examining how gender shaped professional opportunity and later recognition in art history.

A MoMA seminar on women photographers at the Bauhaus considers Henri within the same network as Lucia Moholy, Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, and Grete Stern.^*21 This perspective moves beyond a simple teacher-pupil story in which techniques pass from Moholy-Nagy alone and reveals an environment in which several women were already photographing, documenting, and experimenting before photography became a formal subject at the school. Henri’s mirrored images emerged from this shared experimental culture while remaining distinct in the way they brought geometric construction developed through painting into real space.

Jeu de Paume’s retrospective material notes that Moholy-Nagy discussed Henri’s photography in the journal i10 as early as December 1928, praising the combination of precise recording, light, reflection, and spatial relationships.^*26 The mirror photographs entered discussions of New Vision during Henri’s own working years; their avant-garde status was not an invention of the 1970s rediscovery. They later receded from standard photographic histories. Separating early recognition from later neglect turns the present reassessment into a question of whose work remained in the canonical narrative, instead of a simple story of value discovered too late.

Rediscovery

With the outbreak of World War II, shortages of photographic materials and changes in the professional environment reduced Henri’s photographic activity, and from the 1940s painting again became central to her work. The CSAC archive at the University of Parma, built around 175 photographic materials from 1927–40, documents the interruption around the war and the rediscovery of her photography beginning in the mid-1970s.^*10 In 1990 SFMOMA published Florence Henri: Artist-Photographer of the Avant-Garde, the first substantial English-language study of her photography.^*8 The book is also held by Japanese university libraries, with bibliographic records available through CiNii.^*11 More recently, The New Woman Behind the Camera has placed Henri within the international professional history and networks of women photographers.^*14 This reassessment makes it possible to examine both readings that reduce the work to gender in self-portraiture and readings that value only the formal experiment of the mirror. What identifies Henri within interwar experimental photography is the repeated use of mirrors to hold several directions within one image while recording the surfaces of real objects precisely, across self-portraiture, still life, and advertising.

Sabine T. Kriebel’s research examines several elements Henri brought back from the Bauhaus: Lucia Moholy’s reflections, Moholy-Nagy’s Constructivism, Josef Albers’s optical effects, Marcel Breuer’s furniture, and visual strategies from Bauhaus advertising.^*24 What Henri encountered at the Bauhaus was therefore less the technique of a single teacher than an environment in which architecture, furniture, advertising, and photography shared ways of structuring space. Back in her Paris studio, the painter-turned-photographer translated that environment into concrete arrangements of mirror, table, sphere, and body. The substance of her Bauhaus experience lies in concentrating visual principles from different fields within the photographed space.

The international exhibition The New Woman Behind the Camera places Henri alongside Ilse Bing, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Gerda Taro, and other women photographers working from the interwar period into the early postwar years. It compares the professional conditions under which women entered studio portraiture, fashion, advertising, experimental photography, street work, ethnography, and photojournalism.^*28 Within that comparison, Henri is distinguished by more than being a woman photographer. She used the same mirrors, arrangements, and lighting in a commercial studio and in avant-garde experiments, constructing real space before exposure across self-image, still life, portraiture, and advertising. This differs from Ilse Bing’s urban viewpoints or Krull’s work with machines and the street.