Born: June 28, 1893, New York, USA
Died: July 24, 1982, Laboissière-en-Thelle, France
Matriculated: 1927 (As a Trainee)
Locations: USA, Germany, Austria, UK, France, Italy, Monaco, Switzerland
She lived in six countries and attended school in four languages by the time she was a teen; as an adult she was temporarily stateless, a situation she rectified with a marriage of convenience to a Swiss man. Florence Henri lived her entire life in a new, fundamentally different way: uniquely international, modern, and independent. She was born in New York City, but when she was two her mother died, and she went to live with various relatives throughout Europe. Her father’s death when she was fourteen gave her an inheritance that allowed her an artistic life that almost seemed to choose her. She then moved to Rome to live with an aunt and uncle who frequently entertained the Italian Futurists, just one of the many artists’ groups she came to know and, eventually, to belong to. An accomplished concert pianist, in her twenties Henri became a painter who studied with Hans Hofmann and Fernand Léger. At the Bauhaus, she found her true medium: photography.
Beginning in the early 1920s, Henri knew many Bauhäusler either personally or by reputation, including Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky. So when she stopped off to visit her Bauhaus-student friends Margarete Schall and Grete Willers in April 1927, it is not so surprising that she decided to enroll for a semester as a trainee (Hospitant). She attended Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers’s preliminary course and the classes of Kandinsky and Klee. Lucia Moholy made portraits of Henri as a distinctively modern woman, and she taught Henri photography, surely making use of the darkroom in her and Moholy-Nagy’s master house, the home where Henri likely also stayed. At the Bauhaus, Henri made lifelong friends including Walter and Ise Gropius, Hinnerk and Lou Scheper, Herbert and Irene Bayer, and Marcel Breuer, whose Bauhaus furniture was among Henri’s departing purchases; it went to her Parisian apartment.
Henri created groundbreaking images of modern femininity. Her Self-portrait is now an icon of feminist art history for its blending of feminine make-up with masculine traits—short hair, shirt sleeves, and a self-possessed gaze—and also for its metal spheres, which many interpret as literally endowing herself with “balls.” Henri also trained her lens on other women—and a few men—perhaps most iconically her friend and sometime partner Schall, with whom she lived in Paris. Schall, boyish, smoking, and seemingly lost in thought, is reflected in a play of mirrors and doors, a lesbian subject who is present and yet just out of reach. Henri’s photographs of objects likewise drew praise for their futuristic modernity. In 1928, Moholy-Nagy wrote of Henri’s work as a previously unforeseeable new stage in photography. In exhibitions and publications, Henri’s photographs took the European art world by storm. She had more than twenty photographs in the 1929 FiFo (Film und Foto) exhibition. Her Composition with mirrors and bobbins was among the few pictures illustrated in the catalogue; next to it, Josef Albers, a tough critic, could not resist marking “the best.”
During the Great Depression, Henri’s inheritance did not suffice; in the early 1930s she opened a successful portrait studio and trained students including Gisèle Freund and Lisette Model. She also worked commercially for advertisers and mainstream publications, through which she popularized New Vision photography in unlikely places, including the soft-core pornographic Paris Magazine, which also published nudes by photographers Germaine Krull and Man Ray. In 1938 her work came home to New York in the Museum of Modern Art Bauhaus exhibition. Indeed, despite the relative brevity of her stay in Dessau, Henri was allied with Bauhaus artists both prior to and after that semester, and her work has always been perceived as a Bauhaus achievement. Henri continued photographing for the rest of her life, although she returned increasingly to painting. Her legacy was perhaps best summarized in a 1929 review of the Fotografie der Gegenwart (Contemporary Photography) exhibition in Essen: “France contributed with many dated imitations but only one modern photographer: Florence Henri.”
László Moholy-Nagy, “Zu den Fotografien von Florence Henri,” i10 (Amsterdam), no. 17/18, December 20, 1928, with two photographs by Florence Henri: Composition, 1928 (above), and Self-portrait, 1928 (below)
Florence Henri, portrait composition of Margaret Schall, 1927–1928