Family

Mary Marguerite Dill Henry

An early painting by Modernist painter/printmaker Mary Dill Henry whose work later became more abstract, hard edge constructavist in nature. A Californian, she moved to the state of Washington in 1976 until her death in 2009.

This oil painting by Mary Dill Henry represents the midpoint of evolution of her style, as she left behind her roots in Modernist realism and evolved toward Bauhaus/Constructivism. An accomplished artist from an early age, Henry often took courses in mediums and genres she was unfamiliar with, enjoying the challenge of something new. She participated in the printmaking division of the WPA, she took a course from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1941 that entirely altered the course of her career.

Henry would move to Chicago to attend Moholy-Nagy’s course in painting at the Chicago Institute of Art in 1945, building a reputation as a Bauhaus artist and even getting an offer for a teaching position at the school. However, her career would be put on hold as she moved to Arkansas to support Wilbur’s career in entomology. She would continue to paint while raising children and running the household, sometimes finding employment as a commercial artist (she worked for Hewlitt Packard as a draughtsman). It wasn’t until 1964, after she and Wilbur divorced, that she would devote herself fully to her art career, finding inspiration in Hard Edge and Op Art.

In “Family” we can see the both sides of Henry’s chief influences converging: the figurative subject matter, the expression of human interaction between the parents and child, the representational nod to spiritual realism. And then the suggestion of geometric composition, a stark balance of light and shadow, and the stylized, simplified shapes that assemble with mathematical precision. Here, we truly see an artist at work, pressing at the edges of her own perceived limitations to find what feels true.