Florence Henri: Artist-Photographer of the Avant-Garde

Florence Henri (1893–1982) was born in the United States but spent most of her life in France, where she was closely associated with the major figures of European modernism. Initially a student of painting at Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant’s Académie Moderne in Paris, she quickly became a gifted and knowing participant in the most advanced art movements of the time — late Cubism, Purism, and Constructivism. In 1928, having spent a semester at the Bauhaus in Dessau, she turned to the camera and moved swiftly from the avant-garde of one art form to the avant-garde of another. For a heady ten years before the interruption of World War II, Henri created an extraordinary body of work — still lifes, abstract compositions, advertising photographs, portraits, self-portraits, nudes, street photographs, and photomontages — that contributed to the development of geometric abstract art and of modern photography in France.

Florence Henri: Artist-Photographer of the Avant-Garde is the first extensive treatment of Henri’s work published in the English language. This richly illustrated monograph by exhibition curator Diana C. du Pont offers a concentrated examination of the artist in the context of her time, focusing on her remarkably productive period between the world wars, when she realized her most avant-garde efforts.