Florence Henri

Florence Henri (28 June 1893 – 24 July 1982) was a surrealist artist; primarily focusing her practice on photography and painting, in addition to pianist composition. In her childhood, she traveled throughout Europe, spending portions of her youth in Paris, Vienna, and the Isle of Wight. She studied in Rome, where she would encounter the Futurists, finding inspiration in their movement. From 1910 to 1922, she studied piano in Berlin, under the instruction of Egon Petri and Ferrucio Busoni. She would find herself landlocked to Berlin during the first World War, supporting herself by composing piano tracks for silent films. She returned to Paris in 1922, to attend the Académie André Lhote, and would attend until the end of 1923. From 1924 to 1925, she would study under painters Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne. Henri's most important artistic training would come from the Bauhaus in Dessau, in 1927, where she studied with masters Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, who would introduce her to the medium of photography. She returned to Paris in 1929 where she started seriously experimenting and working with photography up until 1963. Finally, she would move to Compiègne, where she concentrated her energies on painting until the end of her life in 1982. After the death of her mother in 1895, Henri and her father began traveling for his work as a director of a petroleum company. Henri began to study music in Paris at the age of nine In 1906, Henri and her father settled on the Isle of Wight in England where her father then died in 1908. and enrolled in his summer photography course. She moved into Moholy-Nagy's house and became a close friend of his wife Lucia Moholy who encouraged her to take up photography.

By 1928 she had abandoned painting and set up her own studio as a professional freelance photographer in 1929.

One of her self-portraits was published by Moholy-Nagy in i10 Internationale Revue.

As the second World War approached with the occupation of the Nazi Party, there was a noticeable decline in her photographic work which would have been considered degenerate art. Photographic materials would have become increasingly hard to obtain and Florence Henri returned to abstract painting until her death in the 1980s.

Legacy

Henri's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

Her work is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.