Louise Henderson

Life

Louise Etiennette Sidonie Sauze was born on 21 April 1902 at Boulogne sur Seine, Paris, France, the only child of Lucie Jeanne Alphonsine Guerin and her husband, Daniel Paul Louis Sauze, secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Louise remembered how as a child she would go with her father to Rodin's house at Meudon and play with chips of marble while the men talked.

In Paris she met her future husband Hubert Henderson, a New Zealander. Hubert returned to New Zealand in 1923 and proposed to Louise, but propriety demanded that a single woman not travel alone to New Zealand. She was married to Hubert by proxy at the British Embassy in Paris before emigrating to New Zealand in 1925 and settling with her husband in Christchurch where she began studies at the Canterbury School of Art. After earning her diploma in 1931 she went on to teach at the school.

In 1933 she gave birth to their only child, a daughter Diane.

Henderson died in Auckland on 27 June 1994, aged 92.

Education

Henderson attended the Institut Maintenon from 1908 to 1919, passing her Brevet élémentaire in 1918. In 1919 she studied French literature, graduating with the baccalauréat, and from 1919 to 1921 she studied at l'École de la broderie et dentelle de la ville de Paris, graduating as a designer in 1921. From 1922 to 1927 she was employed to draw blueprints and write articles on embroidery design and interior decoration for the weekly journal Madame. In 1923 she also contributed embroidery designs to a Belgian journal, La femme et le home. She frequented public art galleries and was authorised to study in the museum and library of the Musée des arts decoratifs.

Career

In the early 1940s Henderson moved to Wellington and became interested in modernist concerns after seeing a number of cubist inspired paintings by John Weeks, with whom she was corresponding. During World War Two she worked for The Correspondence School; she championed embroidery at this time, writing in the periodical Art in New Zealand and a manual which was published by the Army Education Welfare Service in 1945.

In 1950 the family moved to Auckland and she attended the Elam School of Art but was frustrated by its conservatism. She continued to work in John Weeks' studio, however and her work of this period becomes increasingly abstract and intellectual.

In 1952, at Weeks's urging, and with her husband's support, Louise Henderson returned to Paris for a year to improve her knowledge of modern painting. She studied there with Jean Metzinger. On her return to Auckland she was recognised as one of the leading Modernist painters. An exhibition of Henderson's adaptations of the cubist style was held at the Auckland City Art Gallery shortly after she returned from Paris in 1952. This show combined with exhibitions over following years in both Auckland and Wellington established her reputation as a modern artist of note.

Henderson's Canterbury paintings of hills, gorges and architectural forms blend observation with the visual language and aesthetic theories of the European moderns – Manet, Cézanne, Picasso and Braque. Her movement away from the topographical view of the landscape was shared by other local artists such as Alfred Cook, Rita Angus, Roland Hipkins and Christopher Perkins.

In 1956 Henderson accompanied her husband to the Middle East when he was appointed a United Nations advisor. For three years she painted in Lebanon, Jordan, Iran and Iraq.

She continued to employ a cubist approach, at times almost totally non-figurative, for the rest of her painting life. In the 1960s she was frequently professionally linked with the abstract painter Milan Mrkusich; they completed stained glass designs for the Church of the Holy Cross in Henderson, Auckland, and were also part of a touring exhibition of New Zealand artists' work sent to Brussels, London and Paris in 1965–66. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s Henderson frequently chose still-life subjects as the starting point for paintings. All these works contain faceted abstraction in a traditionally cubist manner but still retain enough figurative fragments to enable the subject to be easily recognised.

Henderson also frequently worked in tapestry. In the 1960s he designed a wool mural for the New Zealand Room at the Hilton Hotel in Hong Kong and made designs for the Talis Studio in Auckland, and regarded tapestry as just as important as her painting.

Henderson continued to be an active painter well into her eighties. Her outstanding contribution to New Zealand painting was recognised in 1973 through the granting of a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council fellowship.

Major exhibitions

Honours

In the 1993 Queen's Birthday Honours, Henderson was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for services to art.

Works

In 1960 Henderson was commissioned to make stained-glass windows and a metal crucifix for the Church of the Holy Cross in Henderson. The work stands 3 metres high at the entrance to the church. In 1963 she was commissioned to produce a work for the New Zealand Room at the Hilton Hotel in Hong Kong: a mural, executed in wool, in 24 colours and measuring 1.5 x 6 metres.