Louise Henderson

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Dame Louise Henderson, DBE was born and raised in Paris. In 1925 she emigrated to New Zealand and settled with her husband in Christchurch, New Zealand 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 the early 1940s Henderson moved to Wellington and became interested in modernist concerns after seeing a number of cubist inspired paintings by John Weeks.

In 1952 Louise Henderson returned to Paris 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 vividly painted adaptations of the cubist style was held at the Auckland City Art Gallery shortly after she returned from Paris in 1953. This groundbreaking show combined with regular exhibitions over following years in both Auckland and Wellington firmly established her reputation as a modern artist of note.

She continued to employ a cubist approach in various ways, at times almost totally non-figurative, for the rest of her painting life. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s Henderson frequently chose still-life subjects as the starting point for paintings. All these works contain facetted abstraction in a traditionally cubist manner but still retain enough figurative fragments to enable the subject to be easily recognised.

Henderson continued to be an active and seemingly inexhaustibly innovative 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.

She was honoured with a damehood in 1993, a year before her death in 1994 ([1]).