Florence Henri

Astraite Composition, 1932

Florence Henri Biography

Florence Henri (b. 1893, New York) spent her childhood and early adulthood moving among New York, Europe, and the Isle of Wight, receiving a broad, itinerant education in music and painting before settling in Paris in the 1920s. She studied painting with the Purists Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne, and in 1927 travelled to the Bauhaus in Dessau, where she audited László Moholy-Nagy's preliminary course and became close to his wife, the photographer Lucia Moholy, who encouraged her toward photography. Henri returned to Paris in 1928 with a Bauhaus-influenced sensibility and a set of purpose-bought props - mirrors, an occasional pear or billiard ball - and gave up painting almost entirely to found her own professional photography studio, which quickly rivalled Man Ray's in reputation. Working from a skylit studio, she built still lifes and portraits in which mirrors laid on the floor or propped against walls confounded the distinction between object and reflection, often retouching away any visible trace of the mirror's edge to heighten the disorientation. Her photographs were included in the landmark international exhibitions Fotografie der Gegenwart (Essen, 1929), Film und Foto (Stuttgart, 1929), and Das Lichtbild (Munich, 1931), and she taught photography to students who included Gisèle Freund and Lisette Model. Henri's photographic output declined sharply after the outbreak of the Second World War, both from material shortages and from the risks of continuing avant-garde work under German occupation, and she returned largely to painting for the remainder of her career.