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Bauhaus Baby
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20094 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
1,993 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
In the 1920s, Paris, long regarded as a center of artistic ferment, rebounded form the Great War to become an even more important international center for the arts. Writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals from all over Europe and the United States were drawn to the French capital to become part of the cultural boom that transpired between the wars. Among them was Florence Henri, an American studying painting in Berlin.
Relocating to Paris in 1924, Henri, who would become France's most important formalist photographer, first demonstrated her uncanny knack for putting herself at the right place at the right time. Shortly after coming to Paris she studied at the Academia Moderne with Fernand Leger, the third most famous painter among the original cubists. Later, at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, she was with photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and she had numerous associations with a number of abstract artists' groups in Paris. Henri managed to align herself with some to the most innovative minds of her time, taking from them what was most salient for her own art and transforming those findings into a unique statement molded by her own intellectual curiosity.
"She was interested in all the avant-garde movements." The Italian architect Alberto Sartoris has said. "She came to Paris to learn, and she found her way; she grasped things quickly and clearly, for she had a great deal of talent." He recalled gatherings at Henri's home in Montparnasse with Sonia and Robert Delaine, Piet Mondrian, Michel Seuphor, and others. "Our discussions revolved around the avant-garde movements, especially those concerned with abstraction, Constructivism, and of course, Futurism."
From these numerous experiences, Henri distilled an aesthetic that joined the School of Paris idea of art form art's sake with the Bauhaus emphasis on experimentation and functional design. From 1928 until the outbreak of World War II, Henri created a body of work that contributed not only to formalist photography but to the development of geometric abstract art. Florence Henri: Artist-Photographer of the Avant-Garde, the touring exhibition organized by the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art, focuses on this remarkably productive period between the wars when Henri realized her most outstanding work.
"Henri was deliberately creating a myth about her personal and artistic identity," says Diana du Pont, curator of the Henri exhibition and curator of exhibitions, University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach. "And she put herself in the most
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