Artwork Information

A foreigner, a female and one of the earliest adopters of a bold and overtly modern style, Louise Henderson is a rarity in the history of New Zealand art. In a cultures that was slow to adopt modernism, she experimented with Cubism and drew on her background in applied art for inspiration in the development of her own modern style. Henderson was attracted to the intellectual spirit of Cubism and to is relationship with history. In this drawing, she applied new ways of seeing and picturing form and space to the female figure. Of course, by 1952 Cubsim was an established style and Henderson exploited that by deploying cubist elements to act as symbole of the modern. Throughout the 1950s, she epxerimented with different cubist-derived techniques in a manner that made them her own.