Study for Woman in Blue

Louise Henderson’s practice responded to the legacies of cubist explorations of optical perception and shifting perspectives, and to the new ways of conceiving pictorial space and the dynamics of form on a flat surface. At Academic Frochot in Paris, she gained a firmer understanding of the analysis of form and space, developing a complex and technically sophisticated method of abstraction based on studies of the nude. There, Henderson worked continuously from life models, creating drawings which operated as ‘research’, and which were used as the basis for later oil paintings. The structure of Metzinger’s Atelier fostered independence. Henderson recalled: ‘I worked and they never taught me anything because the old man said you got to discover it yourself.’

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