Review: Howard House's second Henry show offers a window onto artist's emergence

Mary Henry's paintings are not for the faint of heart. They are rigorously geometric, decisively unadorned by symbol or story, and stubbornly modernist through and through. Henry, who died last year at the age of 96, was celebrated for her adherence to pure abstraction and for her chosen lifestyle — living in solitude on Whidbey Island, painting crisp, bold circles and rectangles.

Last month, Howard House presented a compelling exhibition of Henry's mature abstractions from the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, the gallery is showing Henry's paintings, journals, sketches, and memorabilia from the 1940s, '50s and '60s. The collection of personal ephemera seemed a little baffling and elegiac at first, but, taken together with the paintings on view, they offer a window onto Henry's emergence as an artist.

Much of the art in the show is quite different from her iconic abstract work. The pencil-on-paper drawings of the 1940s, such as "Love Letter," surprise merely by being so literal and sweet. Jump ahead to the large abstractions of the 1960s and you can see the roots of Henry's interests in balance, clean edges, and powerful shapes, but these earlier paintings are aggressively, graphically groovy.

Henry was clearly experimenting with perception — the neon colors and black and white lines almost make your eyeballs vibrate. They're not my favorite things to look at, but they help reveal the arc of Henry's life and art. Newly divorced, Henry was living in Northern California, where she dipped into the burgeoning counterculture and began painting with vigor, reviving her interest in Constructivism that was initially sparked decades earlier.

In the 1940s, Henry had moved to Chicago to study with the Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, who espoused the modernist belief that abstract painting and sculpture and the design of everyday objects could manifest — even construct — a microcosmic vision.

She put her pursuits on hold while raising a family, returning to painting in the 1960s. Other paintings from this time are less fluorescent, but no less exploratory, and the wonderful little color pencil drawings show how Henry was thinking through various geometric designs.

In the 1970s, Henry moved to the Pacific Northwest to be closer to her daughter and, over time, she developed an energetic, but less bombastic, visual language, a stripped-down formal vocabulary that speaks volumes about her philosophical approach to painting.

Henry once said, "I believe the world is constructed on geometries. Everything is so beautifully put together. I've always wanted to create that feeling in my work, of getting down to the nitty-gritty and getting rid of all the things that aren't important, to get to the essence of life.

"What do I hope people get from my work? Honesty. Simplicity. I wanted it to be uncomplicated and direct."

Henry achieved this fundamental clarity through a decades-long process that was anything but uncomplicated and direct.