ART REVIEW : Henri Photos Hold Mirror Up to Talent

Florence Henri was big. A photograph of her at the Dessau Bauhaus in 1927 shows her strapping, stylish and exuding energy. In a portrait taken by Lucia Moholy, she has melancholy eyes and a sweetly amused mouth under its Kewpie-Doll lipstick. Another snapshot makes her look rather startlingly like Jack Lemmon in drag in “Some Like It Hot.”

She was born in New York but lived mainly in Paris supported from a trust fund in London. It wasn’t huge. Once in Germany, she had to play piano for the silent movies to get by.

After the crash of ’29 she opened a commercial photo studio in Paris to make ends meet.

She functioned as an avant-garde photographer around the international abstract art group the Cercle et Carre)--Circle and Square--which included people like Amedee Ozenfant. She met Piet Mondrian and most of the expatriate art crowd around Montparnasse. She did important work in the decade before World War II. Like a lot of people associated with the Lost Generation, Henri was smart, talented and liked to have a good time but was basically serious and always a bit displaced. She’s listed in most handbooks of photographic history but there has never been a major showing of her work in the United States until now.

It’s a traveling show organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 90 works that hold a mirror up to her talent. Literally. She used a lot of mirrors in her spare machine-age pictures. Sometimes, they are placed in such fashion as to confuse the eye a bit and make the photograph function like a Cubist painting. More often, she uses mirrors in portrait studies.

Artists have always used mirrors for self-portraits but they rarely include them in the final picture. Henri did. Her signature work is an auto-portrait. She sits at a wooden table, arms folded, with close-cropped hair and a dark shirt all reflected in a mirror that’s propped up by two large orbs that look like ball bearings. Most observers read them symbolically as standing for both female breasts and male genitalia. Could be. Thanks to the mirror, there are four of them.

It’s obvious that self-portraits have something to do with a search for identity but Henri’s are particularly tilted that way. In one she saw herself as a bohemian tomboy, in the next she’s an earth-mother peasant in a babushka. It was fairly easy to lose track of oneself in the floating world of the international avant-garde, especially if you were a woman and an artist.

The women of Henri’s generation were trying to redefine themselves even as many are today. She did a series of portraits of female subjects that find individuality under the look-alike Clara Bow mouths and penciled eyebrows. The most striking of them shows a woman with a severely pockmarked face who simply overcomes the disfigurement by sheer force of personality. It looks almost exactly like a painting by the German Otto Dix, but here there’s no possibility that the subject was invented.

If you add a couple of Henri’s female nudes to her portraits, it’s clear they are about women who exist for themselves more than for men. Henri certainly did. In 1924, she married a Swiss house servant but went on to have a series of long alliances with other men, artists and intellectuals. She was liberated but not libertine.

Henri started as a painter studying with Fernand Leger. Her abstract compositions included in the survey are very credible. She turned to “New Vision” photography after a summer at the Bauhaus where she was deeply influenced by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and his wife, Lucia. They espoused the same kind of pure abstraction she’d find back in Paris among the Cercle et Carre group. The big guns of French art, Picasso, Matisse and the rest had all spoken out against pure abstraction so Henri’s international crowd felt a bit isolated.

Truth to tell, Henri never comes across as a doctrinaire artist. There is a wryness and warmth in her most abstract compositions. Even when she shot still lives of thread spools or a curving handrail emphasizing their purely formal properties, there is a quality of vague self-mockery about them. It’s as if she recognized that photography can’t be purely abstract because it always has to have subject matter even if it’s just pure light.

She did street photography that hints at later Pop and Assemblage art with its witty angles on shop signs for coiffeurs and spirit merchants. She visited Italy with some frequency and her shots of classical fragments have a surreal edge.

When hard times forced her to go commercial, she didn’t sell out. Her ad for Lanvin perfume uses all the mirrors and Cubist devices of her independent work, turning graphic design into art. She worked quite a bit for a pasta company called La Lune and had fun with its logo, a kind of ‘20s happy face.

She stayed in Paris through the Nazi occupation. When the war ended, the days of the movable feast were gone, never to return. Artists were disillusioned with the worship of technology that had inspired the Bauhaus and New Vision photography. Henri did the occasional portrait but basically turned back to painting and did some quilt making. She lived long enough to see her work rediscovered in the ‘70s before she died at 87.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to Feb. 23. Closed Mondays (213) 857-6000.