UC Santa Barbara

Over the course of the American painter Robert Henri’s lifetime (1865-1929), pictorial strategies of representation were hotly contested, reconfigured, and reinvented through artistic reactions broadly categorized as “modernism.” Within the last twenty years, scholars have redefined modernism from primarily abstraction to modernisms—a diverse range of stylistic responses to modern life. Henri’s realist portraits, however, continue to be excluded from discussions of modern expression in American art due in large part to the association of Henri with the later called “Ash Can” school or circle, the historiography of which is critically examined in the first chapter of this study.

“Representing Modern Women: Robert Henri, Portraiture, and Identity” examines a group of portraits Henri painted of modern women in the 1910s: anarchist Emma Goldman, sculptor and future museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and modern dancer Ruth St. Denis. Henri visually situated his realist portraits in an ambiguous space between academic and avant-garde art and in the onerous position of fighting against both fronts. Henri’s portrait subjects are integral to his portraits’ tendency to push, pull, stretch, and strain against the myriad competing representational strategies present at the turn of the twentieth century, especially portrait photography. Through three case studies, I analyze the individual portraits’ representational successes and shortcomings—their fault lines—for evidence of Henri’s response to modernity while he continued to work within established visual conventions. Drawing upon Henri’s portraits, biographical narratives, archival material, and photography, I argue Henri failed to anticipate the influence modern women like Goldman, Whitney, and St. Denis—through their own self-representational strategies—would have on the reception of his oil portraits. Instead of working with Henri to adapt realist portraiture to meet the demands of modern life, the modern women of Henri’s portraits often worked against him. Goldman, Whitney, and St. Denis each fashioned themselves as more modern than Henri, and their individual expressions of modernity off the canvas challenged Henri’s ability to produce realist portraits as modern as his subjects.