Florence Henri beyond the Bauhaus: the visual construction of new women in Europe 1920 - 1940

Abstract

Working in Interwar Paris, Florence Henri, an avant-garde photographer trained at the Dessau Bauhaus, created a catalog of women's portraits for commercial and private clients. Existing scholarship on Henri connects her to the Bauhaus and her instructor there, Constructivist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Using visual analysis, primary accounts of working artists from Henri's social circle, and existing scholarship by historian Elizabeth Otto as a framework, this paper examines the connections with Sonia Delaunay and Germaine Krull that Henri created while working in Pairs. This paper centers around the visual analysis of a pair of images Henri made in 1931: a self-portrait and a portrait of Sonia Delaunay. This pair of images serves as a touchpoint for the two artist's connection, shifting the thematic focus of scholarship on Henri away from the German context of the Bauhaus pedagogy, the shortest section of Henri's career, focusing instead on how Henri used her photography to create a visual vocabulary of New Womanhood following World War One and how she presented herself to her portrait clients and her community of other working artists as an autonomous, desirable working woman in her self- portraits. This shift builds on the connections between female artists in Paris in the 1930s through their work, even without direct references to one another in primary documents.