Florence Henri Bauhaus

Florence Henri

Florence Henris work occupied a central place in the world of avant-garde photography in the late 1920s, and this survey pays homage to her essential, but under-recognized contribution. This comprehensive publication offers an unprecedented overview of Henris work, produced between 1927 and 1940, and includes her iconic self-portraits and still lifes as well as lesserknown portraits of her contemporaries, photomontages, collages, and documentary work. László Moholy-Nagy, a supporter and her contemporary, is quoted as saying: With Florence Henris photos, photographic practice enters a new phasethe scope of which would have been unimaginable before today. Above and beyond the precise and exact documentary composition of these highly defined photos, research into the effects of light is tackled not only through abstract photograms, but also in photos of real-life subjects. . . . Henri remains an inspiration for photographers, artists, and design enthusiasts who see her work as masterfully executed illustrations and experimentation in perspective and composition; a connective thread that is as relevant to todays experimentation with the medium as it was in its day.

Florence Henri, Artist-photographer of the Avant-garde

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.