Les deux amies (The two friends)

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In Louise Henderson’s Les deux amies, two female lovers are intimately entwined in a series of delicate interlocking planes. Their embrace is gentle, but their bodies are strong and angular, broken up into geometric facets like roughly hewn marble statues. Never before in New Zealand had two women been painted quite like this.

In 1953 Louise Henderson returned to New Zealand from Paris, where she had spent a year studying in the atelier of cubist artist Jean Metzinger. This was one of the first paintings she completed on her return, and it took a starring role in the solo exhibition she had at the Auckland City Art Gallery the same year — a highly unusual honour for a mid-career female artist at the time.

Although cubism was old news in Europe, it was a radical innovation in New Zealand, and Henderson’s exhibition was among the first to introduce a decisively European modernist style to the conservative local art scene. This striking, cubist-inspired composition caught the attention of critics and artists such as Colin McCahon, who admired its resistance to conventional depictions of space.

Henderson had migrated from France to New Zealand in 1925, and her early training in embroidery and textile design in Paris may have helped shape this work. The canvas is a linen and jute blend with an unusually coarse weave, similar to those traditionally used for tapestries. Henderson laid down thin, fluid washes of paint onto the coarse surface, allowing it to settle in the valleys of the weave so the texture is still visible. By doing so, Henderson created subtle tonal shifts which helped create a sense of volume in her figures.

The work is remarkable not only for its stylistic innovations but also for the fact it depicts a lesbian couple — a daring choice for prim and proper 1950s New Zealand. Analysis of the painting under infrared light shows that Henderson originally intended the lovers to be nude, but later painted in clothing. By all accounts, Henderson was a fearless and worldly woman, but perhaps she felt that she was pushing the local art scene far enough with her radical cubist style.

Chelsea Nichols