Henrietta Shore

Waterfall, 1922, Dallas Museum of Art

Los Angeles modernist Henrietta Shore refused to confine herself to a style or movement. In her lifetime, Shore’s powerful, honest interpretations of nature were well appreciated, and like her SoCal contemporary Agnes Pelton, Shore was regarded as an important American modernist. For both women, however, social and personal attitudes conspired against lasting success, and Shore died destitute and virtually unknown. But in 2020, the Whitney’s Vida Americana exhibit, which looked at the effect the Mexican muralists had on American art, included Shore; this exposure should shine a new light on her unusual and powerful works.

Henrietta Shore was born in 1880 in Toronto, Canada; in 1906, she went to New York to study with Robert Henri, who introduced her to Transcendentalism and to Walt Whitman—another artist who got great things out of small things. In her twenties, Shore was exhibiting in Toronto, Paris, and London. But Shore worked slowly and hated to part with paintings. Exposure and sales began to suffer.

Soon bright colors, polished surfaces and simple organic forms appeared, as they did in the work of Georgia O'Keeffe—who had studied with Henri when Shore had—and with whom Shore, like Agnes Pelton, was compared. Of the knockout Waterfall, Shore said such “semi-abstractions” were an attempt to convey in a symbolic way the underlying spiritual forces she sensed in nature. In Waterfall, pure line and the juxtaposition of positive and negative shapes laid down with the mere application of pigment render visible the dynamic power of the eternal.

Photo by Edward Weston

In California, Shore struck up a friendship with a then-unknown photographer, Edward Weston, which would profoundly affect them both. Weston made his first photographs of nautilus shells in Shore's studio, moved by Shore's paintings of them. After a productive stay in Mexico, Shore followed Weston to Carmel, where her self-imposed isolation no doubt stalled her career. After a retrospective at the De Young Museum in 1933, she exhibited rarely. Six public commissions from the WPA, including four murals for the Santa Cruz Post Office, helped.

By the late 1950s, Shore was impoverished and living in squalor, and some “concerned” do-gooders got her committed to an asylum. She died there in 1963, at the age of 83, her art now virtually unknown.

Her great friend Edward Weston said: "Shore realizes a fusion of her own ego with a deep universality... When she paints a flower she IS that flower. When she paints a rock, she IS that rock."

A rock perhaps, but unfortunately, an island.