Seattle painter Mary Henry (1913-2009): Began career in her 70s

(Click images to enlarge. Portrait of Henry by former PI photographer Grant Haller. Paintings from Howard House.)

Art likes to contradict itself. Both voluptuary and ascetic, it revels in the sense world yet honors rigor, leads you astray and points to higher ground.
Its rules are made to be broken. Because those rules favor the young, unknown older artists who come on strong are particularly appreciated. Their example derails careerist thinking and restores a sense of possibility.

Few artists came on stronger in Seattle than Mary Henry, who died yesterday at age 96. An  abstract painter who produced tough geometric forms filled with bright yet sour tonalities, she lived her last decades on Whidbey Island.
In summer her garden was a sight to see, and she tended it largely by herself until recently.

In a 2001 interview, she told me the place was all grass when she bought it.

I was only 60,
so I was able to do a lot of digging. I put everything in, from trees
and shrubs to flower beds. Someone helps me by mowing and trimming the
shrubs. I don’t do it all alone. I garden in the summer and paint in
the winter. The rest of the year, it’s a little of each.

She left golden grass growing in silky clumps in her meadow. Everything else, she put there: water lilies on her
pond; giant rhododendrons on gently rolling hills; beds of blue
bonnets, fragrant lavender and pink, papery poppies; wine grapes on
trellises; flowering plum and apple, and wild, yellow roses leaning out
into the light from tops of trees.

Born in Sonoma, California, Henry worked as a muralist on the Federal Art Project during the Depression and studied with the Hungarian designer-photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design in Chicago.
She married, had two children, stopped and started painting repeatedly, with little encouragement or notice.

It’s a fairly normal curve for women artists, especially women of her generation, circumscribed by paternalistic dismissal and then clobbered, like everyone else, by the catastrophes of aging. But instead of fading into her seniority, Henry surfaced in her mid-70s with triumphant, joyful work.

It grew directly from her experience at Chicago’s Institute, known as the New Bauhaus after the famous German institution that sought through abstraction to join the worlds of the spirit and the everyday.
Her work derives from…

the period when abstraction was a search for divine form, the universal underneath the particular.

The modernist imperative to “Make It New” accelerated the usual process
of change in art. Movements came and went with dizzying speed, yet
Henry remained focused on exploring her own rigorous interpretations of
early 20th-century abstraction.
She had the free-hand confidence of someone who turned visual tunes
around in her head for a long time before finding a way to give them form.

For her, abstraction was a clarifying order of interlocking rectangles,
horizontal stripes, lumbering squares and powerful wedges.
Her color choices leaned toward the bracing. Yellows tunnel through
whites and hang over orange. Her blacks shine, and her blues are deep
as the sea.

Irregular yellow bands might pop out against flat blacks and sturdy blues in a small drawing. Working larger, long verticals might shore up fat, faintly irregularly horizontals. Curves and half-circles rest in the austerity of right angles. One can almost hear the “click” as a curve slides firmly into place.

Living most of her life in the countryside, her paintings have an urban edge. They are shocks to the system, siren calls to experience the world anew.

For many years, however, these siren songs were sung in secret.
Art is something of a team sport, in that artists tend to thrive when keeping close company with other artists. Through discussion and example, they challenge, affirm and advance each other’s ideas.

Henry, in contrast, has always been a bit of an art-world loner.
She was the fourth of six children born in the mountains of Sonoma County, Calif., near a quicksilver mine where her parents worked.

My parents were good people, but they had no sense of beauty. That was my interest from the beginning. I was still small when my brother married. My sister-in-law brought something new to our house. She cut flowers and arranged them on a table. She gave me a sense of what a room could look like if somebody tried to make it pleasing. Once, as a present, she made me a water lily out of crepe paper. I kept it for years.

After high school, Henry spent a year as a mother’s helper, getting together the money to go to college.

I don’t know what the mother did, because I did everything. I hated it, being a servant.

Determined to be an artist, she attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, earning a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1938. She married in 1943 and had two children, a daughter in 1944 and a son in 1947. She became the family’s chief breadwinner by specializing in industrial design for corporate headquarters, but longed to be painting.

My husband was Cary Grant-good-looking, but he never found himself, even though he graduated from Stanford, quite an accomplishment in those days. As a father, he was a bit of a Victorian. After a while, I lost respect for him.

She stayed married until her daughter was in college and her son in high school. In 1964, she made the break, buying a house in Mendocino after the divorce.

By the late 1960s, the hippies had arrived.

I loved them. I’d have parties, 150 people a night, always with music. The Rolling Stones were my favorites, also Bob Dylan and Cream. It was a good time to be alive. People who were young then were very accepting. They never treated me as if I were an old lady, but I must have been, to them. Eventually, they decided they had to earn a living. The place changed. There were more tourists than locals. I didn’t feel at home anymore.

She had another reason for making a change: her art career was going nowhere. Although she knew people whom she felt were creative in Mendocino, she didn’t know any other serious painters. It was an artist colony that lacked committed artists. Being one, she was odd man out.

In 1976 she chose Seattle, partly because her only surviving child, daughter Suzanne, lived there. (Henry’s son was killed years earlier by a drunken driver.) But Instead of living in the city, she bought property on Whidbey Island.

It was remote but ugly, not likely to draw tourists.

From her point of view, its overall ugliness made it the perfect place to create a haven of private beauty.
Finding a gallery to show her paintings wasn’t easy.

I think a lot of gallery owners at that time would look at me and think I was too old to be interesting. And my paintings were hard. Abstraction isn’t easy to like. People have to develop a taste for it, and why should they, when there are so many other kinds of art out there.

Asked how she managed to keep painting in spite of years of neglect, she chuckled.

It’s what I do. If I were a writer, I’d write and wouldn’t stop just because nobody read me. Art is part of my life. In two years, I’ll be 90. Then I’ll be old. Until I can’t, I’m going to continue to do what I’ve always done, though at a slower pace.

Living alone left room for indulgence. Waking early, she’d make herself a “home-made latte” (hot milk and instant coffee) and retired to bed to drink it while reading.
She favored mysteries, especially the English ones, such as Dorothy Sayers, but also kept up with art books and journals. She got up when she felt like it and listened to a classical radio station from Canada that has no advertising.

In the summer of 2001, she tended to cut short her reading in order to be out in the garden, killing caterpillars.

There’s an infestation every seven years. Look at that apple tree. They’ve eaten all the leaves. I drown them, step on them and use organic spray. I try to give up and live with them, but every seven years, I’m out here, killing as many as I can.

Standing beside her, I saw two caterpillars climbed over each other in slow haste, heading toward new green shoots on a rose bush. She turned away and shrugged, tucking a strand of wild, white hair behind her ear.

I guess you could say in my life I’ve been left to my own devices. I knew what I wanted to do, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.