Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Mary Henry at the Hallie Ford Museum

Mary Henry at the Hallie Ford Museum
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Sue Taylor

At age 91, Mary Henry, brilliant practitioner of geometric abstraction, was honored with this handsome 20-year retrospective of paintings and drawings. Her earlier work was recently included in "Matriarchs of Modernism" at Marylhurst University's Art Gym in Portland, a historical exhibition that surveyed the efforts of women artists in the Northwest before the collective struggles of the 1970s won their successors better opportunities and recognition. This exhibition, "Mary Henry: American Constructivist," revealed a senior "matriarch" of undiminished power and long-established formal mastery, one still working daily in her studio on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound.

Inspired by travels to the arctic north of Alaska and the formal gardens of Europe, Henry creates ambitious paintings that bear no obvious resemblance to nature, except in their highly "intelligent design." Giverny #2 (1985), for example, features orange, yellow and brown rectangles and a cocoa-colored triangle on a white ground, accented by diagonal bands of black; only the autumnal palette and the addition, upper left, of several diagonal stripes of sky blue explain the reference to Monet. Other works, like Pavanne (1993) and Sarabande (1997), adhere strictly to horizontal and vertical bands and rectangles in muted grays, greens and black, aptly alluding in their titles to the measured rhythms of slow, stately dance.

It's fascinating to see Henry partition the canvas in the spirited After Vivaldi (2000). First she establishes three vertical panels of equal width in (left to right) ocher, white and pale blue. She then subdivides the central, white section vertically in half and horizontally into thirds, painting the top left third black, and the bottom right two-thirds blue to match the neighboring right-hand panel. The resulting black and white rectangles at the top center of the canvas are then repeated, at a smaller scale, across the now irregular blue field, unifying and enlivening it. Harmonious and pleasing, the internal relationships do not announce themselves immediately but are ultimately self-evident and clear.

The same thoughtful processes inform Henry's Prismacolor drawings, reminiscent of Agnes Martin's in their delicacy, but less meditative than cerebral in their conception. Best of all, Henry can be funny, as in the delightful Mondrianish On the Road to Riga (2001), where an eccentric grid of thick and thin black lines shares a white field with ungainly L-shaped planes of yellow, blue and--orange! Henry's good-natured wit is an additional joy in an elegant body of work already delivering ample esthetic pleasure.

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