Portrait of Florence Henri (Solarization), 1942

Portrait of Florence Henri (Solarization)

Florence Henri, a German-French artist born in New York in 1893, studied painting in Paris with Fernand Léger and took up photography at the Bauhaus school in Dessau in 1927, taught by Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy. She then opened her own photography studio in Paris. Her experimental work was compared with the photography of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy and involved the use of prisms and mirrors, and avant-garde techniques such as photograms, photomontages and radical perspectives. She also specialized in fashion and portrait photography. In 1929, she became a member of the abstract artists’ group Cercle et Carré, co-founded by Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García. In 1963 Florence Henri gave up photography and took up painting again. She died in 1982 in Compiègne, France.