and by 1911 played pieces by Grieg, Liszt, and
Franck at concerts in Bechstein Hall (later named
Wigmore Hall). By 1912, Henri moved to Berlin to
continue her music studies as the pupil of Egon Petri,
and then Busoni. With the outbreak of war in 1914,
Henri, unable to leave Berlin and to receive money
from her inheritance in England, had to make a
living playing the piano at the silent cinema. Perhaps
due to this difficult situation and her own highly self-
critical view of her ability to compete against the
piano masters, Henri decided to abandon music
and took up painting instead. In the beginning, she
executed traditional drawings of figure studies and
landscapes. Towards the end of the war, she met the
writer and art historian Carl Einstein, who became a
mentor and close companion for many years. Ein-
stein was associated with the Cubist circle in Paris.
In Berlin, Henri studied in the atelier of Johannes
Walter-Kurau, where she met Margarete Schall, a
fellow painting student who became a close friend.
Berlin was a rich source of modern art activity; the
city’s galleries exhibited the works of Fernand Le ́ger,
Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, Vasily Kandinsky,
Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Kasimir Male-
vich, and La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy. Quite probably, all
of these impulses convinced Henri to move to Paris
to further her study of art. By 1924, she had taken up
residence in Paris, determined to learn more about
modern art. Between 1925 and 1927, she enrolled at
the Acade ́mie Moderne, where she studied with
Le ́ger, Ame ́de ́e Ozenfant, and at the Acade ́mie
Montparnasse with Andre ́ Lhote. In the fall of
1925, her work was shown along with others from
the Acade ́mie Moderne in theExposition Internatio-
nale L’Art Aujourd’hui, the first international exhibi-
tion of avant-garde art in Paris since the war. Henri’s
paintings were shown side by side with works by
proponents of Cubism, Futurism, Purism, Construc-
tivism, Orphism, Synchronism, and Surrealism.
While living in Paris, Henri traveled frequently to
Berlin and along the way visited her friend Margarete
Schall in Essen. Through Schall, she met students and
faculty members of the Bauhaus in Dessau. In 1927,
Henri enrolled in a summer session as a non-matricu-
lating student studying with Moholy-Nagy, Kan-
dinsky, and Paul Klee. Although photography was
not yet part of the Bauhaus curriculum, Moholy-
Nagy and others used photography as part of their
teaching method, finding the camera an ideal art-
making device for the machine age. Through her
experience with Moholy-Nagy, Henri learned all the
current camera techniques: double and multiple expo-
sures, montage, photograms, micro-photographs, and
negative prints. Equally influential to Henri’s training
in photography was her friendship with La ́szlo ́’s wife,
the photographer Lucia Moholy, who made signifi-
cant portraits of Henri.
Henri soon recognized the medium’s capacity as a
pictorial language and outlet for creative expression.
Upon returning to France, Henri began to develop a
large body of photographic work based upon her
Bauhaus experience and an extension of the formal
and structural aesthetics of Cubism, Purism, and
Constructivism. These non-objective principles forged
an alternative to the then-dominant French art move-
ment Surrealism. Henri transcended the avant-garde
of one art form to that of another.
Henri’s greatest experimentation with geometric
abstraction occurred during the period between
1929–1930, the years in which she was most closely
involved with the artists and critics associated with
Cercle et Carre ́founded by Belgium poet, writer
and art critic Michael Seuphor. Cercle et Carre ́was
an avant-garde group of international architects,
painters, sculptors, writers, and intellects which
published a review of abstract art under the same
name. Henri was one of two photographers whose
work appeared in the group’s magazine. Another
Paris-based organization equally devoted to geo-
metric abstraction,L’Art Contemporain, featured
her work in their publication—the only photogra-
pher in a review devoted to art, poetry, and theory.
In her photographic work, Florence Henri
exploited the dialogue between realism and abs-
traction, but always maintained a recognizable
subject. She was concerned with transparency and
movement, and she explored spatial extension and
fragmentation in her utter modern vocabulary.
Her still life and abstract compositions achieved
by balancing abstraction with a pure and essential
subject were created in the spirit of the machine age.
She viewed space as if it were elastic, distorting
figure and ground and altering planes through the
use of mirrors and lenses. Henri chose mainly a few
primary elements of essential form. One of the most
frequently repeated forms in her imagery is that of
the sphere—either as a perfectly round ball(s) or in
such natural forms as an apple.
In her portrait work featuring mainly artists,
Henri was primarily concerned with women. She
helped to redefine and shape mainstream ideas of
womanhood revealing forceful and independent
types whose features appeared as abstract rhythmic
patterns. Her compositional format—filling the pic-
ture plane with close-up shooting and tight cropping
and immediacy of the subject—was influenced by
Lucia Moholy and followed the formal strategy of
New Vision (Neue Sehen) portraiture. Henri con-
structed an image of the new modern woman, evok-
ing at times the serious introspective mood and evenHENRI, FLORENCE