Louise Henderson
untitled
oil on board
signed Louise Henderson in brushpoint upper left
1320 x 865mm (each panel)
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from The Ron Sang Collection, Lot 32, Art + Object, Auckland, 15 March 2015.
Louise Henderson – A Greater Lyricism
Essay by VICTORIA MUNN
In June 1952, Louise Henderson wrote a letter to her husband and daughter from Paris. In it, she recounts with great excitement her encounter with French artist Jean Metzinger at Académie Frochot, who praised the personality in her work, stating that it was ‘truly original and beautiful in colour.’ 1 Although her style develops and changes across her lengthy artistic practice, Henderson’s deep fascination with colour remains a constant.
Produced in the mid-1960s following the death of her husband Hubert, Henderson’s Elements, Air and Water series marks her steps past cubism, instead embracing a more emotional response to nature. untitled (Lot 67) is representative of these atmospheric canvases, dominated by blue tones and passages of rusty and fiery oranges and filled with gestural brushstrokes, which mark an important development in Henderson’s art. ‘Once I was interested in any solid form,’ she explained, ‘Now I am interested in things that are nothing and everything – like water and air.’ 2 In untitled, it is her sensitive choice of colours that flood the canvases, which imbue the diptych with an impressive sense of liveliness and transitory natural elements. Produced in the following decade, Tahitian Women (Lot 68) also showcases Henderson’s sensitive abilities as a colourist: the kaleidoscope of orange and pink shapes in the figures’ skirts, the gems of colour in the background, and the golden glow emanating from the women, fill the canvas with a vibrancy and liveliness.
Within her oeuvre one finds numerous artworks depicting two women. Not only did the subject matter enable her to explore female relationships, the twin motif situates Henderson in an art historical tradition, notably popular among fellow French artists such as Jean-Jacques Lagrenée (1739-1821), Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec (1864-1901) and André Lhote (1885-1962). The subject adapted as her style developed, and served as a useful vehicle for her to work through her artistic concerns. In several paintings depicting two female forms, produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the women are surrounded by lush green bush, as the artist seeks to integrate human figures with their natural surroundings. In Tahitian Women, Henderson plays with the position of figures in shallow space, and using colour to evoke a sense of warmth, life and sunlight. Although the women’s hair, arms and torsos are clearly delineated from the background, the flurry of light, geometric, colourful forms in their clothing blend into it.
The 1970s marked an important point in Henderson’s artistic output. In the early years of the decade, she focused on depicting the New Zealand bush – its nuanced colours, unique natural forms and patterns of light and shadow. In Flower Forms (Lot 69), an example of the floral arrangements she produced in the early 1970s, Henderson unites this intense interest in nature, and the still-life tradition. But in this work the composition forgoes the heavily contrived, static nature of many still lifes – both old master and modern – and instead evokes a sense of fluidity and movement, and demonstrates her experimentation with the translucency of watercolour to overlap natural forms. Rather than hard-edged, clearly defined cubist planes and heavy blocks of colour, the forms have a greater lyricism and, likely layered on top of one another before the paint dried, suggest a spontaneous, free and expressive artistic process.
Although both Tahitian Women and Flower Forms are representational, and retain discernible figurative forms, there are passages that verge on abstraction. Certainly, untitled embraces a poetic, expressive response to nature, barely teetering on representation. Henderson embraced this margin, explaining, ‘Though I do not entirely denounce non-representational work, I do feel that for Western man it has an element of escape, of intellectual withdrawal. My life is on the fringe of two worlds and I want to express this duality.’ 3 Indeed, although she experimented with abstraction, Henderson’s artistic practice focused on the human experience, and reflecting life around her. She had depicted Samoan and MÄori women in the 1950s, experimenting with cubist techniques in works such as Samoan Woman in Yellow (1954) and Maori Matrons (1953), in which the figures are created with flat planes of colour. She returned to the subject of Polynesian figures in the 1970s and ‘80s, surely partly inspired by her several trips to Rarotonga to visit her daughter. The work favours spirit over narrative, colour and light working over depth, and demonstrates, as Flower Forms does, Henderson’s consistent favouring of a shallow picture plane in the late 1960s and 1970s. Here, as in the 1950s works, the female forms dominate the composition. The women, stretching almost the entire length of the great canvas, are almost life-size, and the geometric forms adorning the clothing evoke the colourful, patterned textiles of Polynesian dress. No longer a young Parisian woman; Henderson’s subjects reflect her environment in the Pacific.
In a 1970 New Vision Gallery catalogue, Henderson stated her intention to combine non-representational painting and abstraction with subjects and elements from life that would be recognisable for her viewers. ‘The acceptance of a more common, human pattern and the human figure,’ she signaled, ‘will probably increase in my work.’ 4 This demonstrates that although painting was a personal practice for Henderson, in which she responded to her own emotions, surroundings and artistic concerns, she did paint with her viewer in mind, and sought to connect to audiences through her paintbrush.
1 Louise Henderson, letter to Hubert and Diane Henderson, 15 June 1952, Louise Henderson Archive, EH McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o TÄmaki, RC 2018/4/8.
2 Louise Henderson, quoted in Otago Daily Times, 31 March 1965.
3 Louise Henderson exhibition catalogue, New Vision Gallery, Auckland, 1970.
4 Louise Henderson exhibition catalogue, New Vision Gallery, Auckland, 1970.
