Florence Henri – Piano studies in Rome; painting tuition in Berlin and Paris
Florence Henri was born in New York on 28 June 1893, the daughter of a French father and a Dutch mother. After her mother’s premature death, she moved with her father to Silesia, the home of her mother’s family, then to Paris, Munich and Vienna before finding her temporary home on the Isle of Wight on the south coast of Great Britain. Henri came indirectly to photography: She was initially much more interested in music and had decided on a career as a pianist, starting a piano course in Rome where she lived with her Aunt Anni and her husband, the Italian poet Gino Gori, following the death of her father. After graduating, the broadly musically gifted and motivated Henri turned to painting, met the art critic Carl Einstein and gallerist Herwarth Walden in Berlin, attended the art academy, and took additional lessons from the Latvian-German landscape and portrait painter Johann Walter-Kurau. In Paris, she registered at the Académie Moderne where she broadened her knowledge of painting with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.
Encounter with Bauhaus photography in Dessau
In 1927, Florence Henri travelled to Dessau to join the Bauhaus. She had already met the Bauhaus artists László Moholy-Nagy and Georg Muche and showed great interest in the tubular steel furniture of Marcel Breuer. Moholy-Nagy welcomed the young artist into his house and introduced her to his first wife Lucia. The two women became friends, Lucia introduced Henri to photography, and the Moholy-Nagy’s taught their house guest the most important foundation techniques and effects such as photomontage and multiple exposure. Although she was still receiving painting tuition from Josef Albers at the Bauhaus, her main interest clearly lay in photography, and she acquired further knowledge mostly autodidactically. Henri attracted attention already with her first photographic works and from 1929 participated in several photography exhibitions including the groundbreaking Film and Foto (FiFo), organised by the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart.
An icon of photographic avant-garde
Florence Henri eventually returned to Paris and opened her own photo studio there. She became well established in the Paris art scene and formed fruitful encounters with influential photographic artists such as Man Ray, André Kertész and Germaine Krull. Her pronounced love of experimentation led to the development of an individual style which on the one hand was rooted in the Bauhaus aesthetic, but on the other also showed a clear proximity to Dadaism and Surrealism. Alongside her artistic photographic work, Florence Henri earned a living as an advertising, fashion and portrait photographer. Her models included Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delauney and Hans Arp, whilst the American photographer Lisette Model was her student. The Second World War made Henri’s work very difficult; her artistic approach displeased the National Socialist occupiers and the materials necessary for photography were hard to come by. Her photographic experiments of the 1920s and 1930s were celebrated as iconic works of the avant-garde after the Second World War, but the artist had long returned to painting, and she only photographed as a hobby on her travels. Her travel photographs, however, are generally expressly not counted among her artistic works.
Florence Henri died in Compiègne, France on 24 July 1982.
Florence Henri - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
