Florence Henri

Florence Henri ( born June 28, 1893 in New York; † July 24, 1982 in Compiègne / Bellival, France) was a photographer and painter.

Florence Henri began as a pianist, after studying music, she turned to painting. In Berlin, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts and was a student of John Walter - Kurau, in Paris, she studied at the Académie Moderne in Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, and then in 1927 to go to the Bauhaus in Dessau. Here Josef Albers was one of her teachers. In László Moholy- Nagy eventually studied photography and learned through it effects such as multiple exposure and photomontage know. Henri in 1929 and 1930 at the International Photography Exhibition " photograph of the present" and the groundbreaking exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund " Film und Foto " (FIFO ) in Stuttgart, the work of the New Photography imagined.

Following their stay in Germany, she opened a photo studio in Paris, where she also taught his own students, including Lisette Model, and joined the Paris art scene. Here she was, among other things, meetings with Man Ray, Germaine Krull and the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, important impulses for her photographic work. She developed, based on extensive experiments with mirrors and prisms very much its own oeuvre, which ranged from influences Léger, the Bauhaus, but also of Dadaism and Surrealism. At the same time she was working a day job as an advertising, portrait and fashion photographer. At the count of her portrayed Hans Arp, Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky.

After the Second World War, Florence Henri received from their friends and acquaintances portrait commissions, which helped her to supplement their livelihood. When traveling, she photographed only as a hobby. These photographs do not apply to this day as part of their artistic work. She devoted herself to painting. As a painter, she was close to contemporary art movements of the 1920s.