Florence Henri

Florence Henri (1893–1982) was an American‑born artist whose restless upbringing and multifaceted training shaped her pioneering photographic vision. Born in New York in 1893, she lost her mother at age two and thereafter spent her childhood moving between Silesian relatives, a Parisian convent school, and family homes in London and the Isle of Wight. Trained initially as a pianist under Ferruccio Busoni in Rome and connected to the Italian Futurists, she abandoned music during World War I—after a stint accompanying silent films in Berlin—to pursue painting.

Denied reentry into France in 1924 and declared stateless, Henri secured Swiss citizenship through marriage and by 1925 was studying late Cubist painting with André Lhote and Fernand Léger in Paris. In 1927, at age thirty‑four, she enrolled at the Bauhaus in Dessau as a non‑matriculating student, where László Moholy‑Nagy introduced her to photography and Lucia Moholy encouraged her fearless experimentation. Between 1928 and the late 1930s, Henri created her most celebrated work: mirror compositions that frame, isolate, and double her subjects; photomontages and multiple exposures that layer space and time; photograms and negative printing that subvert realism. These formally complex images—featured in the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition—combine the New Vision’s technical inventiveness with a Surrealist sensibility, producing spatial and psychological ambiguities that continue to captivate.

Opening a successful Paris studio, Henri applied Bauhaus techniques and her mirror aesthetic to advertising commissions, sustaining her practice through the 1930s. In the early 1960s she renounced photography and lived quietly in France until her death in 1982. Throughout her career, Florence Henri forged a unique visual language that bridged painting and photography, modernism and surrealism, leaving an enduring legacy of experimental, boundary‑defying imagery.