CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/18/2015

Florence Henri: Mirror of the Avant-garde 1927–40

"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."