Preview our Fall 2023 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
APERTURE
Florence Henri: Mirror of the Avant-garde 1927–40
Foreword by Marta Gili. Text by Cristina Zelich, Susan Kismaric, Giovanni Martini.
Florence Henri's work occupied a central place in the world of avant-garde photography in the late 1920s and this survey pays homage to the artist's essential contribution. Accompanying an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, the volume offers an overview of Henri's work produced between 1927 and 1940, including her iconic self-portraits and still lifes as well as her lesser-known portraits of her contemporaries, photomontages, collages and documentary work. László Moholy-Nagy declared that "with Florence Henri's photos, photographic practice enters a new phase—the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today. Above and beyond the precise and exact documentary composition of these highly defined photos, research into the effects of light is tackled not only through abstract photograms, but also in photos of real-life subjects … Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective...." Henri remains an inspiration for photographers, artists and design enthusiasts alike. Florence Henri (1893–1982) initially studied painting at the Academie Moderne in Paris. In 1928 she turned to photography after spending a semester at the Dessau Bauhaus. Henri continued to make photographs until World War II when the Nazi occupation of France forbade her photographic style and materials became difficult to source. She turned her attention to abstract painting and continued to paint until her death in the early 1980s.
Featured image is reproduced from Florence Henri: Mirror of the Avant-garde 1927–40.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The New Yorker, Photo Booth
Genevieve Fussell
The influential and under-recognized surrealist photographer Florence Henri began her career as a painter. Born in New York in 1893, she spent her early adult life in Europe learning from masters like Fernand Léger, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky.
"Femme aux cartes" (1930) is reproduced from Florence Henri: Mirror of the Avant Garde, 1927-40, the catalogue to the Jeu de Paume's lauded recent exhibition and the first comprehensive monograph on this important yet largely overlooked artist. An American expatriate who studied at the Bauhaus, Henri is known equally for her experimental black-and-white portraits, self-portraits, still lifes and photomontages as her triumphant, malleable sexual identity. Ingrid Sischy is quoted, "The camera has been used directly, head-on, creating a new kind of non-cosmetic, face-to-face reality. By shifting the distances and directions of the camera, spatial relationships within the picture are altered, giving illusions of flatness or of three dimensionality… Like aerial photographs, recently pioneered, some of these portraits reveal new orders of pattern: the shape of a head unflinchingly fills the piture, and the facial features resemble topographical information on a globe." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 11 in. / 224 pgs / 200 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $75 ISBN: 9781597113328 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 6/23/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Published by Aperture. Foreword by Marta Gili. Text by Cristina Zelich, Susan Kismaric, Giovanni Martini.
Florence Henri's work occupied a central place in the world of avant-garde photography in the late 1920s and this survey pays homage to the artist's essential contribution. Accompanying an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, the volume offers an overview of Henri's work produced between 1927 and 1940, including her iconic self-portraits and still lifes as well as her lesser-known portraits of her contemporaries, photomontages, collages and documentary work. László Moholy-Nagy declared that "with Florence Henri's photos, photographic practice enters a new phase—the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today. Above and beyond the precise and exact documentary composition of these highly defined photos, research into the effects of light is tackled not only through abstract photograms, but also in photos of real-life subjects … Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective...." Henri remains an inspiration for photographers, artists and design enthusiasts alike.
Florence Henri (1893–1982) initially studied painting at the Academie Moderne in Paris. In 1928 she turned to photography after spending a semester at the Dessau Bauhaus. Henri continued to make photographs until World War II when the Nazi occupation of France forbade her photographic style and materials became difficult to source. She turned her attention to abstract painting and continued to paint until her death in the early 1980s.
